


black madonna & golden knight

by ninemoons42



Series: vespers of Insomnia [1]
Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: Alternate Universe - Always a Different Sex, Alternate Universe - Gangsters, Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Dreams and Nightmares, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/F, Families of Choice, Female Friendship, First Time, Gang Wars, Getting Together, Girls with Guns, Going to the Mattresses, Hallucinations, Hand Jobs, Heist, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Abuse, Implied/Referenced Past Cor/Aulea, Imprisonment, Inspired by Music, Late Night Conversations, Love Confessions, Male-Female Friendship, Miniboss Fight, Minor Character Death, Mission Fic, Mother-Daughter Relationship, Non-Consensual Drug Use, Oath of Allegiance, Organized Crime, Past Drug Use, Rule 63, Tattoos, the affair of the blue pearl necklace
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-02-18
Updated: 2019-02-28
Packaged: 2019-03-20 22:38:27
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 17
Words: 100,599
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13727460
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ninemoons42/pseuds/ninemoons42
Summary: Insomnia: city of crime families and gang wars, in the grip of its long decline into anarchy, into chaos, into hell.In the nearly endless nights a girl named Prompto dares to escape, and dares to dream of freedom.(And she runs straight into the arms of the Lucis Caelum crime family -- into the arms of its young princess, its ruthless heiress, Noctis Lucis Caelum.)





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> In other words this is my AU based on the original Mafia concepts of Final Fantasy Versus XIII -- except for the bit where both Noctis and Prompto are female characters. Guns, haute couture, and friendships abound here -- so now you've been warned! :)
> 
> (This is the main stream of the storyline; the ideas presented in "what we do in the neon-lit shadows" will reappear here, but in different forms.)
> 
> ////
> 
> Now with art, created by MathClassWarfare on the occasion of this fic's first anniversary -- see it [HERE](https://twitter.com/MathClassWar/status/1097176726205980672)!

Three minutes, she thinks. Three minutes. Little more than that. And if she throws all her thoughts into it, if she tilts her head just so, if she angles her wrist and her elbow straight and loose, she can do this, she can do this, it’s only three minutes, and if this is the music that will forever identify her, that will forever precede her into the dark places, she’ll take it: she’ll take heart from it, and look up, and be brave. 

She’s not going to cry. She’s not going to cry. She’s mostly all cried out, these nights. The tears used to make her feel better, but then the tears became a commodity, became something _they_ wanted, something _they_ wanted to take from her, and she has had e-fucking-gods-and-Astrals-nough.

No more. No more. Nothing more to give them. Nothing more for anything or anyone wearing the Izunia colors, the Izunia ranks.

Enough. Enough. The word jangles and jangles in her brain like sharp edges, like the twist and the flick of a knife. Flicker, flicker, flicker, the muted sickly yellow lamplight on a chipped and cracked edge, flicker and flicker and she breathes, she times her breaths to the mad whirl of her thoughts, centering.

The mad whirl of her, of her mind, that is her refuge. That is her safe space. That allows her to smooth the lines in her face, to quiet the tic at the corner of her right eye, throbbing misfiring nerves -- gone. Gone. Calm.

Three minutes and thirty seconds, to give the other shadow in the room time to get away. 

_Go away go away go away,_ Prompto Argentum thinks, and she’s not sure whether she’s thinking the words for herself or for the person clomping away from the bed, wooden sullen features, scuffed boots and stained suit and gleaming black leather in strap and harness, the cold dead weight of guns at hip and flank and ankle.

Overload.

The door shuts on that presence. Click click click. Locks on the outside.

And she is alone in this room of pretty cabbage roses in pretty pastels, but the wallpaper does nothing to hide the layers upon layers of stains on the floor. Blood and gods know what else, and the forensic cops would have such a field day, if only they were still alive, if only they weren’t corrupt. She knows for a fact that at least one of the people posted outside the door used to work in forensics. Used to be so good at putting together the pieces of a human body together, bones and sinews and all the finer and finer branching networks of blood vessels, until that person decided to break human bodies instead. 

The bed is comfortable beneath her. Silk sheets, plump pillows, the warm weight of a duvet folded neatly at the foot, easy to ease a foot into it and kick it up to haul its edges to her chin. 

Glass of not-water next to her bed, in a dainty goblet. Red tinges on the edges of whatever it is that’s been left for her to drink. Even the tiniest drop of it on her tongue, tonight, had almost made her sick: it’s hell, she thinks, to pretend to swallow down that swill. Books piled next to that goblet, mock choice, mock solicitude. 

Everything in this room is tailored for her: her shirt, her skirts, the boots waiting next to the bed, the cuff shackling her left wrist. Keyhole, chain, and the other half of that pair of restraints fastened to the headboard. 

Once upon a time she’d broken almost all of the bones in her hand, trying to free herself from a loose set of cuffs: and what did she get for it but several doses of the drug waiting in the goblet, and none of those doses were diluted either. One swallow of that drug is an overdose, and she’d been forced to drink three goblets full, and she’d nearly died as a result -- nerves sharpened to the point of overwhelming pain when they’d splinted and immobilized her hand, no anesthesia, nothing. 

The echoes of her own long-ago howls still haunt her dreams.

Her nightmares.

Tonight, she lies and makes her show of meek compliance. Pretends to sleep. There are cameras in this room. The positions of those cameras are changed every night. Or, sometimes, she thinks that the cameras are just turned on and turned off at random. Maybe the cameras only look like they’ve been turned off. Surveillance, round the clock, and guards on her door all day and all night when she’s here, and she only looks like a thief, like a gunner, but in reality she’s closed up like the last drop of gold in a greedy miser’s hoard, the last piece of treasure.

At least she knows Ardyn’s not coming tonight, not on this night, oh no. Business so pressing he’d only sent her a video message via her guardian’s smartphone: 

_You’re going to have to do without me tonight, pretty princess, pretty Prompto. I’ve some very nasty people to kill and I need to see them personally dead, so I won’t have time to attend to you. Don’t worry. Tomorrow the sun rises on Insomnia and it will be mine, it’ll be mine to rule and I’ll let you out to walk the streets, and you’ll tell me you love me, and we’ll have so much fun and there will be so much blood for us to play with. So much blood! Do say you’ll wait faithfully for me._

That smirk. That hideous suit. That ridiculous mauve hat concealing all manner of sins, all manner of ugliness. 

And she knows for a fact that Ardyn Izunia is literally counting the days. Literally thumbing over the beads of his life and its suddenly truncated span. Ardyn Izunia is dying, the cancer in his lungs having started the slow inexorable creep of metastasis into the rest of him, and he’s made it his goal to destroy Insomnia before he dies.

And all she wants to do is to gut him before he gets to that date with death.

Calm, calm, she thinks, and she hums the music now, in its intricate intense rhythms, in the sweet building crescendos. A piano coming to life beneath dexterous hands, singing out, and the low throb of the music. Light swirling tune that disguises the speed and the complexity of the notes on the sheets of paper, soaring exuberant playful -- 

The piano in her mind circles back around to the beginning of the piece and maybe this time she’ll sing, she’ll -- 

The door to her room is heavy. Sturdy. She knows the immense sound and the immense crash of it being slammed shut. 

Once upon a time she had nearly been slammed shut in it.

And so the sounds of the world are muffled but -- _crash_.

Loud enough that the sound travels straight to her handcuffs, rattles the bones of her.

Prompto only has that half-second to make the decision and -- yes, she’d rather fight, even if fighting will get her killed. Even if the discovery of her theft will mean the drugs and several nights of Ardyn’s attentions -- she’d rather _fight_ \-- she pulls the very small gun from where she’s hidden it, between the seams and the layers of the mattresses making up her lush bed. One-handed, she checks it for its bullets. Cocks it. Her working hand is steady and her eyes are clear, and the gun never wavers even when there’s another mighty crash, even louder than the first, and the door actually cracks -- she can see the blazing white soulless light of the outside corridor, filtering through, and the cracks widen and widen -- 

She can hear! The people outside the room are all shouting at each other! Overlapping layers of arguments, blue streaks on the air, and she listens for the profanity and ignores everything else because suddenly, suddenly -- maybe this is the time, she thinks, as she slowly lowers the gun. Maybe this is the moment, for the bag she’s kept hidden all this time -- the bag she’s never allowed herself to think about, not and risk anyone else knowing about it and blackmailing her -- or worse, anyone else knowing about it and going straight to Ardyn -- 

The bag means freedom, more or less literally: but to get to the bag, there are other things that she needs to do. First and foremost, the handcuffs -- 

She fumbles in the seams of her shirt for a small discreet length of black metal, a sliver of it, really, too easy to overlook and to forget -- 

“Prompto.”

She only doesn’t scream because she’s snatching frantically at her gun, and -- then she does scream, when she recognizes the thin pale face, the washed-out eyes -- _Didn’t he have blue eyes?_ she thinks, wildly, _he used to have blue eyes, he used to have eyes like mine,_ torn and frightened and shaking with nerves, with the sheer crash of adrenaline rampaging through her -- 

“Don’t be afraid.”

His hands are moving towards her: hands stained with bits of bone, with too much blood. It’s too much to take in, with his red-drenched hands and his plain white scrubs, not a speck of dirt on the thin cotton when his hands and, and even his feet are all red and glistening with however many people he’s already killed to get here in the first place -- she can see the ruin of her guard through the door, the gaping hole torn in that barrel chest, the ripped-off hands -- 

She swallows, and forces herself to meet his eyes, and tries to smile. 

“Thank you,” he whispers. “Thank you. For smiling. You are very beautiful. When you smile, and when you don’t. But -- but don’t cry? Please?”

And he reaches for the chain of her handcuffs. Incongruously small hands, shattering that chain as though it were nothing more than matches, than tinder, than toothpicks. “You’re free now,” he goes on. “You should go.”

Like an afterthought, he breaks the steel that’s still ringing her wrist, too, and those pieces clatter to the floor between her and him.

She takes his hands, reckless now, heedless now. Moved. 

“Loqi. Thank you,” she says. And: “Come with me.” 

“If you stay here any longer, they’ll turn you into me. Who knows what else they’ll turn you into.”

“I know,” she whispers, and she pulls him close, and presses kisses into his hair, into his temple, into the corner of his unblinking eye. “So come with me. I’ll get you out of here, and we’ll find some way of helping you. Even if I have to -- ”

She doesn’t know what comes next, doesn’t know how to finish that sentence, but she -- she wants to do it, whatever _it_ is, for his sake.

Bitter soft laugh as he clings to her, wasted weight of his arms around her torso -- arms like a hideous parade of track marks. “No, Prompto. I’m not coming with you. I can’t. I’m too far gone. I won’t survive out there. And I don’t want to be out there.”

She holds him, and looks into his eyes, once blue and now a wan wasted gray, and she won’t cringe away from the truth of him.

The drug on the side table is diluted to a tenth of its original strength. She’s been forced to take the undiluted versions, of course, counted out, carefully, the amounts neatly registered and recorded somewhere.

Loqi? Has never known anything else but the undiluted drug, forced down his throat again and again until he began to scream for it, until he began to need it, until it was all he knew and wanted and wanted -- 

“What can I do for you,” she asks, and she feels her own heart break at the steadiness of her words.

Soft smile.

He kisses her cheek. 

And says, next to her ear, “Please, will you? Prompto?”

Only his hands move, his hands on hers -- he guides her to grasp her gun in both hands. Guides her to put the muzzle of the gun right beneath his chin. 

“Sorry,” he says.

“Don’t apologize,” she growls. She holds the gun steady where he’d placed it. “Not for this. I can. I can do this. Least I can do for you.”

She kisses his cheek, lingers -- then whispers, “Sleep well.” 

“Thank you,” Loqi says.

And Prompto pulls the trigger.

Loqi is still smiling when he hits the floor.

She nearly throws the gun away: no, no, no! She did that, she did that -- at the last moment she swallows down the bile and the grief and the rage, and she lunges for the corner of the room: here there is a huge freestanding closet, immense and heavy, but the secret of it is, no one ever found its hidden compartment -- and her fingers are clumsy and shaking as she works the springs and the latch and then she has to start over, cursing all the while -- finally the bag is in her hands, and the first thing she does is fumble out the balaclava and pull it on.

The first thing she’d ever stolen from this place: a simple knitted balaclava, black, ragged around the seams, hard to breathe through.

Safe, safe, every strand of her hair hidden, and she doesn’t look back, not even for a jacket: she dashes out the ruined door and -- the corridor is bloodstained and empty and she can still hear the shouting several levels up and down. Heart hammering madly in her ears and she manages to listen for voices coming and going anyway, and again and again people yell about backup and the Lucis Caelums, far too many derogatory names for people who identify as female, and she thinks wildly, she thinks about heading straight for the Citadel district and turning herself in -- 

It’s better than any alternative she can think of and some she doesn’t even want to consider.

 _Try not to die,_ she tells herself, _try not to die,_ and she turns a corner and someone is running away from her, and she slips past and puts them out of her confused mind. 

The layout of the compound is twisted and full of too many switchbacks, not enough cover, too many confused shadows milling about, and she doesn’t actually know how she knows to turn down one set of steps and then push past one door and the next -- but suddenly she’s spilling out into a garage, her bare feet slapping the cold wet paved concrete and the painted-on lines -- there, there, the motorcycles, she needs one of those, and she pushes past all the gaudy sportsbikes with all their gaudy trimmings and heads straight for the control booth, heart still pounding -- 

The man in the booth yells at her, and she doesn’t stop, doesn’t think, just brings up the gun in both hands, just plants her feet and fires -- perfect double-tap into the center of his chest and then one more round expended between his eyes. Remorse shudders briefly through her, just for a moment, before she steps over the corpse and looks at the bank of keys on a rack: here are the car keys, and here are the motorcycle keys.

The plainest of the keys warms quickly in her shaking hand, and she hopes she’s not going to escape into the night on the green monstrosity, or the orange one -- no time to try all the bikes, she has to pick one at random, and there’s an inconspicuous black one, right at the end of the rack.

_Please work please work._

She jams the key into the ignition -- it fits, smooth click, and the engine roars to life, and she allows herself to cry -- but she does it as she gets on and, fuck, she’s forgotten to wear shoes, she doesn’t even have shoes, she’ll burn herself on the moving parts of this thing alone, what kind of escape is this? But it’s too late: she’s kicking the bike into gear and she’s flooring it, jumping the barrier at the mouth of the garage and, and, oh, where is she? Where in Insomnia is she? 

“Citadel,” she mutters. “Citadel district.”

But first she leaves the Izunia compound far far far behind her, in the twists and turns of the streets. Sharp salt on the breeze that stings her eyes. Sharp cries at a clutch of intersections -- she just executes a screaming u-turn and roars away -- if she has to get into a fight, she will, but before that -- 

Red and green lights strung up above her, at the entrance to a no-name place, a club of some kind, judging from the muffled bass-beats thundering up through her heels: lanterns faded and stained and tattered, maybe from happier times, or the illusion of happier times.

She takes the bag and leaves the motorcycle. 

Money in the pockets gets her past a hulking bouncer, gets her in without so much as a mutter or a question of any kind.

Straight into the ladies’ room and she locks the door behind her. Looks at the walls out of sheer habit. Are there cameras here? Likely. Still, there’s a cubicle. The door can be locked.

She cries, again, as she strips off her clothes. Shreds the pieces bare-handed, and flushes the lot down the toilet. Never again. Never ever again. She bares her teeth at her own frightened reflection in the mirror. She’ll die before she puts anything like those colors on again. Too many flounces and frills, too much white lace frou-frou, nothing else but to make her a decoration, nothing else but to make her a plaything, attractive and vapid and uncomplaining. Unresisting. The lacy knickers and the pretty bra go into the trash, too.

The bulk of the material in her bag: drab clothes, mismatched, all wrong for her. The button-down shirt has a long tear in its sleeve. The cotton briefs are a size too large, and the sports bra is a size too small. The jacket has padded shoulders. At least the trousers fit, and now she has socks and plain black flats too.

And then there are the important little things. 

A box of hair color.

Acrid chemical stink rises around her in the little tiled room, and the voices talking loudly just on the other side of the door aren’t helping, either: but she grits her teeth and pulls the cheap plastic gloves on, and as soon as she drips the first lines of runny cream onto her scalp she feels a weight drop off her shoulders, little by little, until she thinks she can almost breathe properly, until she thinks she can almost be comfortable, burying the blonde of her hair under drab black.

She spends almost an hour next to the sink, most of those minutes determinedly not-thinking, and she has to bend over awkwardly to rinse her hair. Tepid water, greasy feeling that manages to get right through the plastic on her hands, but the rest of the process goes off without a hitch and now all she has to do is to reach for the pocket inside the bag. A little case and a little bottle. Her eyes work just fine, but right now she can’t be Prompto, she’s not allowed to be Prompto -- she has to be someone else, she has to be a mouse, she has to be a passing shadow in the night. That means she can’t stand out in any way.

So, in with the brown contact lenses.

She knows who she is and she can still just about recognize the outlines of herself when she looks in the mirror again. 

“You can do this,” she whispers as she washes her hands for the last time.

Bag into the trash can and balaclava into her pocket. 

She squares her shoulders and marches out of the ladies’ room, and the girl at the head of the line complains loudly about -- taking too long to get off -- and Prompto nearly chokes out a laugh as she passes the bouncer again and stuffs another small wad of bills into that gloved hand.

The motorcycle is still out on the street, waiting for her -- and that’s all she knows before there’s a burst of gunfire nearby and then she’s swearing beneath her breath, cursing the fact that she only has her dinky little pistol, as she rolls for cover and the bike topples over, riddled with holes -- she dives behind a rickety wreck of a car and tries to think, tries to think over the mad wild beat of her heart -- 

Now, now is not the time for her to be thinking about Ardyn -- all she wants to do is spare a forlorn thread of a wish, that whoever’s shooting up the streets tonight might get lucky and put several rounds into him for her. Half a dozen into his mouth and then one into his heart, and a dozen more into his brain: that’ll do, she thinks, that’ll be a start, a start towards making up for all the things he’s done, all the things he’s made her do, all the things he’s done to Loqi -- 

Again the shriek of gunfire and she’s really really really not supposed to be here -- and some instinct makes her peek out of cover. Makes her try to get the lay of the land. Makes her pay attention to the voices -- and there, there, she hears her, hears the voice of the woman, powerful, commanding, even when she’s doing nothing else but swearing:

“ _What the fuck!_ ”

Prompto almost smiles, and she mutters, “Pretty much that.”

And the woman’s voice is entirely new to her, entirely strange, because for some reason she thinks she hears some kind of weary concern, some kind of bravery.

So when she peeks out again and _does_ recognize the people that woman and her people are shooting at -- she doesn’t care how reckless it is to fire off a shot or two at them, doesn’t care that she’s only running herself low on ammunition -- she wants to fire back at the Izunia soldiers one way or another and she quickly spots the ragged line opposing the woman, and she picks off the nearest two or three, as casually as breathing, as simple as bracing her elbows and knees for simple stability, simple support -- 

Bullets winging towards her, and she growls as she crawls for the next piece of shelter, the next junker of a car on this street -- shit, shit, open alleyway, she has to cross it to get to the next bit of safety and why is there nowhere else for her to go, how could she have been so _stupid_! 

Oh gods, oh gods, she can see the shadows shifting in that alleyway and, and, she’s trapped in the open and she has nowhere to go and she’s a target, she’s a bloody target, might as well turn the gun on herself, might as well measure her for the coffin and lay her out -- 

Prompto bares all her teeth and turns her back on the street and -- ducks -- 

Swearing, oncoming, soft and growing louder and the first thing she sees is the silhouette of a girl in flaring jacket-hems and the heavy bulk of a ballistic vest, trousers and the streamer-flash of red-black-white plaid tied around one arm, and then she’s turning around again, echoes and fumes and the way her arms and hands are braced around her SMG -- 

That girl screams: “Noctis!”

And Prompto has no time to react to that name, to that name that even she knows, because there’s a flash of blue light -- oncoming flames -- sleeves on fire, and the girl coming out of the alley is snarling even as she dives for the ground, even as she rolls across the sidewalk and then bats at the ashes still clinging to her, before pulling a pair of guns from shoulder holsters, and opening up on the shadows moving towards her -- 

The girl who’s on her feet now, who’s practically shooting over Prompto: her long coat singed. Gold pins in her short spiky hair, anchors for her long streaming veil. Lines of gold thread picking out the seams of her dress, all of one piece from the collar that rises snug around her throat to the vents interrupting the knee-length hems of her skirts. Boots, and the stains on them are very very new. She’s not just carrying pistols, either: rising over her right shoulder is the short end of something shaped like a shotgun.

“Noctis,” the girl in the ballistic vest hollers, “ _come on!_ ”

Movement, behind Noctis! Between her and the girl in the vest!

And Prompto throws herself between that movement and the shock in Noctis’s eyes, draws a bead on center mass as best as she can and fires, fires, fires -- 

That moving shadow drops straight to the ground and doesn’t get up.

Noctis Lucis Caelum is almost gawking at her, when she turns back around. 

“Good shot. You saw that? You saw them clearly?”

Prompto shakes her head.

“Thanks,” she hears Noctis say.

“Can you do something for me?” Prompto says, then.

Eyes, narrowing. 

She’s heard stories of this girl’s eyes, bright with controlled fury despite the soft obscuring veil. She’s heard about this girl, and about this girl’s mother, and about their family.

But all she says is, “I need you to kill me.”

Blink. Blink. “Who are you, and what did you do.”

“Not to kill me for real,” Prompto says, evading the first question. “But you have to make it look like I died, tonight. You -- it’s you, right? The person I’m thinking of, that’s you, right? You have to make it look like you executed me. Can you do that? Will you please do that?”

“Why?”

She doesn’t back away even when Noctis advances on her.

She really wants to cower, really wants to hide her face.

She does neither. Takes a deep breath instead, and tells her the truth: “I would rather be dead than be returned to Ardyn Izunia. I just escaped him. Please don’t take me back there.”

Hiss, vicious, carrying.

Noctis glances briefly over her shoulder. “Iris.”

“Sorry not sorry,” the girl with the SMG -- who is apparently named Iris -- says in a cool deadpan.

“No, no you’re not,” she hears Noctis say, before turning back. “Gonna have to explain things to me, I don’t even know your name, but -- yeah. Sure. Let’s do something about the thing you asked for. Okay? So, get down on your knees.”

Prompto doesn’t sigh with relief when she obeys -- and it’s so easy to obey Noctis -- she just folds, immediately, willingly. As easy as taking the next breath, and the next. 

Weight of a pistol against her forehead. 

“Like this?” she hears Noctis ask.

“Yeah,” she mutters.

She watches the movement of Noctis’s trigger finger.

And she hums, soft rising intense crescendo --


	2. Chapter 2

She wakes to the quiet soft white noise in her ears, the tears long since dried and gone stiff where they’d flowed from the corners of her eyes and onto her temples, and -- she moves her left hand, experimentally, and -- oh _fuck_. Fuck. Of course, of course: she’s not shackled any more, is she? There is no weight clamped around her wrist and still she’s fallen asleep flat on her back, left arm thrown up towards the headboard, elbow in its crooked angle and -- and this is what’s been done to her, this is the least of her problems, the fact that she doesn’t know how to fall asleep unless, unless she lies the way she does, as though she were still cuffed -- 

As though she were still a prisoner.

But: this bed. The bed is different, narrow but not constricting. Pillows beneath her head, and the smell of fresh laundry. Blankets that she’s kicked partway off, that are bunched around her right foot. 

She remembers the kiss of Noctis Lucis Caelum’s gun and the music that had been filling her throat as she knelt at her feet. She remembers Loqi in her arms, alive and almost fully there with her, in the moment he’d moved her hands, in the moment he’d asked her to put him out of his misery. She remembers the stink of the black hair dye and the strange weight of the contact lenses.

She remembers everything and now, where is she?

Unshackled and alone in a small gray room. Her old quarters, ornate in its flourishes, had always been inexplicably cold in the mornings; this place is nearly a featureless blank and yet it’s warm. Her eyes itch, and she blinks and blinks and when she looks at the side table again, she can still see a small plastic case, and a large bottle of contact lens solution. Has someone replaced her supplies? 

She pries off the little lids marked L and R and -- yes, here they are. Her contact lenses. The brown color looks murky, looks muddy. 

She hangs her head for a moment, and bites her lip savagely, and she doesn’t want to keep on breaking down, she doesn’t want to keep on falling to pieces -- but she doesn’t even feel like she’s somewhere else. Any moment now Ardyn will come through the door -- and she feels cold until she turns her head and wakes up all the way, and now she’s looking at a window and not a wall.

Her heart sinks past her feet. Past the tiled floor.

There’s an evil voice in her mind, crying its _I told you so_ over and over again.

There’s no way the window isn’t made of one-way glass.

There’s no way she’s not under observation: certainly there is a very obvious camera mounted over the window, and certainly it’s pointed right at her. How many other bugs are here? How many other cameras are here, far less obvious? How many observers, how many cameras, are on the other side of the glass?

No shackles but here she is. Still a prisoner. Just a different prison.

She crosses the room in a handful of short steps and she reaches out to the glass, and places the palm of her hand against its strangely damp warmth, and bows her head. “I,” she whispers. 

The words falter, at first, and then pick up in speed. “I’ll talk. I’ll tell you everything I know. You won’t even have to, to threaten me. I need to talk and I will. I’ll tell you every last thing I remember. But, but please, I -- I don’t want to be like this, I can’t be like this, I don’t want to be a prisoner -- ”

“I thought I told you last night you weren’t?”

The door, swinging open on soundless hinges: but the voice of the girl who comes in more than makes up for it.

The girl named Noctis.

Some kind of instinct propels Prompto back down to her knees.

“Fuck,” she hears Noctis say.

“Dear,” says another voice.

The third voice from last night. The first one she’d heard, before Iris, before Noctis, before anyone else -- the voice like courage -- 

Height, is Prompto’s first impression: in her bare feet this woman probably would still tower over Ardyn, and he’s no shrimp. Height, and black, and the strange worn-down quality of her slight smile. The vigilant warmth in her eyes.

But Prompto is being raised off the floor by that tall woman’s hands. White tape wrapped in an odd series of branching lines, around and past her left wrist. Black ragged burns in her fingers, like powder-grains buried far too deep into her skin, that will never work out properly.

And Prompto can’t help but blurt out, “How long have you been doing this?”

“Longer than you have been alive, unless I miss my guess,” is the soft and gentle answer. “You might be about Noctis’s age? Feel free to correct me if I’m wrong.”

The door opens again, and Noctis, standing sentry, takes a long step towards the glass window.

Prompto stares.

A willowy woman in a suit and long wild dark hair, supervising, as a table and four chairs are brought in. Things to go on the table: a plastic box in green and gray, like something to store fishing tackle in. Next to that, trays of food, real food, smells enclosed and growing stronger in the confines of the room. Plates and cutlery and sturdy mugs, and white-lidded containers that hold -- fruit, bread, a wedge of cheese, some kind of pasta dish. Pitchers of water, of something else to drink in a bright-pink hue. A silver coffee pot and its thin streamers of steam. 

“What?” It’s all Prompto can think to say.

“I think that’s everything,” the woman in the suit says. 

“Not everything. Cake,” Noctis says. “We were promised cake.”

The woman laughs quietly. “I would’ve brought it if it was ready, right? Ignis says it’s on its way. He’s unwrapping the whole thing, near as I can tell.”

“He doesn’t have to do anything to it, no forks, no knives, no fancy whatever on top -- I’ll just eat it straight up,” Noctis mutters, and she, too, might be smiling, Prompto thinks. 

“And so would I,” the tall woman says. “But if he says he has to do something to it before it can be eaten -- you said he was unwrapping it? Then all we can do is wait on him. Just come straight in when it’s ready, Crowe, please?”

“Yes’m,” and the woman in the suit -- Crowe -- steps out the door again.

Prompto stares as both Noctis and the tall woman take their seats on one side of the table.

Identical shades of blue in their eyes. Prompto tries to lose herself in the details. They’re related for certain. She can see that in the shapes of their bones, their chins, the slopes of their shoulders. Silver strands winding artfully into the tall woman’s hair, which is caught at the nape of her neck in a long loose-wound braid. Noctis’s hair, easier to see now that the veil is gone, is short, and seems to be made of nothing but featherlike layers and spiky pieces. 

Black, of course, they’re both dressed in black. Cropped trousers and a silky blouse on Noctis; long sleeves and long skirts on the tall woman. 

In the overhead light Prompto can see the lines of ink on their skin.

Visible in the gap of Noctis’s blouse: the shapes of something very much like feathers.

Long dark tendrils swirling up from the tall woman’s neckline, up towards her ears.

“Where the fuck is Cindy,” Noctis says, after a moment.

And as if in response, the door opens and one more girl comes in, stark contrast to this room and to the other women in her yellow jacket and her peach frock of lace and intricate pleats. Golden hair flying around her face in curls, eyeliner and lipstick and a dusting of glitter over her collar bones. Dark shapes inked into her lower leg, a half-dozen birds in flight.

Everyone in this place that Prompto’s seen has been armed with some kind of gun or another -- even the tall woman, with the holstered pistol that she’s left out in the open, next to the tackle box.

The glittery girl is carrying something else completely: there’s a plain black sheath riding her left forearm, blocky plastic buckles to secure it, the red-seamed handle of a long curved knife only becoming visible when she takes off her jacket. Work gloves in her free hand as she waves: first at Noctis, and then -- at Prompto herself.

She doesn’t wave back so much as raise a baffled hand and leave it still.

“Slight problem in the garage, but we seem to have things under control now,” that girl drawls, too-rounded vowels, sweet husk of her voice, as she drops delicately into the third chair at the table. “Engine malfunction. I’ve left it to the others. Sorry I was late. Oh, why are you still standing over there?” The last is directed at Prompto.

Who blinks, and there’s no other chair to sit in, and so she finds herself facing Noctis, and the tall woman, over the food and the tackle box, all under the gaze of the camera over the glass window.

“Now we are all here,” and the tall woman smiles a little when Noctis snatches up a slice of bread and tears it into pieces, tucking dark crust and off-white crumb into her mouth. “Introductions. We’ve been rude to our guest long enough, don’t you think?”

“And by _guest_ ,” the glittery girl says, “we really do not mean _prisoner_. I mean. We don’t do that. How uncivilized.”

Opposite her, Noctis chews and swallows and says, “The fact that you eat beans willingly is uncivilized.”

“Go fuck yourself,” the glittery girl laughs.

“Children,” the tall woman says, but she covers her mouth briefly, and there are deep lines radiating from the corners of her eyes. 

Entirely against her own rational mind’s wishes, Prompto thinks something in her almost relaxes.

“As I said.” And the tall woman extends her hand over the table. “I am Aulea Lucis Caelum. May I have your name?”

In a daze, Prompto shakes that offered hand. “Aulea. You’re Aulea? You’re the head of the Lucis Caelum family?”

“Yes. And I fear entirely what you have been told,” is the mild response. “But I would like to hear it anyway.”

“I don’t want to tell you,” Prompto says, shaking her head. “It’s all lies. Everything I’ve ever heard in, in the Izunia ranks. All of it lies. Which I will tell you. But, but, I know they’ll lie about anything and about everything. I want you to know that.” She clenches her hands into painful fists. “They lied to me for, for seven years.”

Aulea’s mouth flattens, pinches, goes hard. “I -- see.”

And she looks over her shoulder, at the camera. 

Says, clearly, “Turn it off. Turn it all off.”

“Mother,” Noctis says, but not to stop her, Prompto thinks.

“Will you trust me?” Aulea says next. “Will you take me at my word? Now you are no longer being watched, or listened to.”

“I don’t care,” Prompto mutters, and she almost believes herself. “I’m, I’m here in your territory after all.”

“And as Cindy has said,” Aulea says, “we are not uncivilized. So take it from me for now. My personal word. You’re not being watched.

“This is Noctis,” Aulea continues after a moment. “My daughter. Of course you met her last night, as it was she who brought you to us. I’d very much like to hear the story of why you asked her to, to kill you. And to make such a show of it. You must have a reason.”

“Yes,” Prompto mutters, and coughs afterward. Her throat’s gone dry.

Soft sound of liquid, moving, flowing. A cup pushed towards her wrist. The scent of tea rises to her nose, like crushed berries, like flowers. “Drink that. I’m Cindy Aurum,” the glittery girl says.

Prompto nods, and then lifts the cup to her lips, and the first sip nearly overwhelms her with relief.

She cries into the cup.

Clack of something being opened: she looks up, and sees the tackle box through blurry eyes, and the white shape being held out to her.

Nothing for it but to put the tea down. To clean her face. Cool dampness infused into the soft tissue, and the scent of lemons.

“Thank you,” she whispers, when she’s scoured the tears from her cheeks and her mouth.

“You’re welcome,” is Aulea’s equally quiet response.

The next thing she knows, she’s being plied with fruits and pasta and cheese, and she’s -- she’s hungry, she can’t make sense of her thoughts, and she eats and the others talk quietly around her, and pass the food around.

Crowe returns at some point and Prompto stares at what she brings in, plain and unadorned dark-brown crust and pale-yellow cake beneath.

“You kept some for yourself, I hope,” Aulea murmurs.

“Didn’t have to. Ignis baked us another one, we ate the whole thing last night. We’re good,” is the response.

Noctis laughs, and pours herself another cup of tea. 

And Aulea cuts the large square of cake in half, and slices off thick pieces, and hands them around the table. 

“Cake for breakfast?” But Prompto doesn’t really want to hear the answer. 

One bite of the cake and she’s lost in delicate moist crumb and the taste of the honey, the faint floral scent of it, the sweet crumbs sticking to her lips and to her teeth.

But she remembers her manners and slices the cake to offer the others, before taking a second serving.

“Guess you’ll have to eat the rest,” she hears Cindy say. Nothing sharp in the words.

“We’ll leave it here,” Noctis says.

So Prompto doesn’t reach for a third slice even though she really wants one, and she sets her cutlery aside. Makes herself meet Aulea’s eyes, and Noctis’s, and Cindy’s, and says, “You don’t mind me talking about terrible things, so soon after that cake. I, what was it though? It was really really good.”

“Castella. And you’ll meet the person who made it soon enough, I imagine,” is Aulea’s reply. “He is a trusted member of this family.”

“Castella,” Prompto repeats. “That sounds nice. But now, now I have to talk about things that are not nice.”

“No,” Noctis says. “You don’t have to.”

“You don’t understand. I have to tell you. I wouldn’t even be here in the first place without help. I, someone came to me in the place where I was being held.” She swallows convulsively at the thought of the cabbage roses, the silken sheets. “He was named Loqi, I never heard if he had a last name, or if that was the name he had even been born with. As far as I know, Ardyn had had him from the cradle. Stole him from his family, from his parents.”

Quiet hiss from her side, sounding almost like the other girl, from last night. What had been her name, Prompto wonders. 

And goes on. “And what did he do to Loqi but, but feed him -- terrible things. Whatever it is you find on Ardyn’s dealers, whatever it is that you find on the people who get addicted to that drug, that red liquid -- they tested every single formulation on Loqi, and then some. Did anyone ever tell you exactly how the drug works? Or do you have people trying to find out? I can tell you. I can tell you, you know you have to use that stuff diluted? It’s the only way you can survive multiple doses. So I don’t know, I don’t know how he managed to stay alive, because he never knew anything else except the pure stuff, and they were giving him that thing for, for years. He was already there when I was brought in.”

She swallows a sob and goes on, thoughts spilling wildly out. “That drug. I was on it, too. And they controlled my doses. Every night a set amount of the very diluted stuff. And, and the pure thing whenever I screwed up. One dose if I caused a small problem. More doses if I caused larger problems. And, and do you know what that drug does? Oh what am I saying, you must know by now. You know it, it causes hypersensitization? Every inch of every nerve, working double time. Sensations increase. Clothes, water, the very movement of the air -- you feel those, ten times, twenty times as strong as you normally would. Human brains are not equipped for that. My brain certainly wasn’t: and every time they gave me the drug in its pure form I, I think I came closer to losing my fucking mind. Every time I tried to come down from the trip, it took me longer and longer to, to do that.

“Loqi became dependent on the pure stuff. Makes sense, right? It was all he had! That was what they gave him! And, and he, his brain, parts of it, just shut down and died and, and parts of him changed. I didn’t finish the story of last night. Loqi broke me out of my cell. You know how? He fucking broke down the door. That wasn’t the only thing he broke either. Handcuffs,” and here she seizes her left wrist with her right hand. “I slept in a handcuff clipped to my bed every night. The thing was sized for me. I couldn’t wriggle out of it. And Loqi just walked in last night and fucking broke the chain of the handcuffs. He broke the cuff too. Snap, like you take a breath, like I do. Snap!”

How is she on her knees? When did she fall out of her chair? Why is her voice unraveling? She hears her own ragged breaths, her sobs, and can’t stop. 

Presence next to her, tall and worn and warm. Aulea’s presence, kneeling with her. “Do you feel that you need to tell the story? All of it?”

She nods, wretched and weeping. “As much of it as I can bear to tell you right now.”

“If I ask you questions, will that be helpful?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know. But ask. You can ask.”

Arm around her shoulder, gentle bracing weight. 

The fragrance of wood and soft ash and salt.

She takes a deep breath.

“It’s clear to me they held Loqi for the express purpose of becoming, becoming a test subject,” and does Aulea sound like that, like rage and like her daughter when she snarls? “And you? What about you? What did they want you for? Why were you taken from your family?”

“I don’t know if I had a family,” she says, which is not really an answer to the question, and she gulps in a breath and goes on. “I know, that’s not what I meant. I was born, so obviously, somebody got pregnant and I was that somebody’s child. But I’ve never known -- parents, cousins, nothing. I was an orphan and that was it. No one to run to. No one to depend on. So there was just me. But I, I was such a dumb kid! I made the mistake of trying to pick Ardyn’s pocket. I was hungry. I was worse than dumb: I tried to get his wallet and I got his gun instead, and I stared at it and then he was on me, he was telling me he could buy me a meal, and -- then I was his,” and she tears away.

Bang of her own fists on the floor, and she sees red. 

And then she sees blue, as Noctis suddenly sits down on her other side, and holds on to both of her hands.

“I went with him willingly,” she confesses, sick to her stomach.

“You were hungry, you were alone, you were a child! You can’t be held responsible!” is Noctis’s response, vehement and hard-edged. “You can’t hold yourself responsible!”

“Quietly,” is all Aulea murmurs.

“Sorry. No shouting. Yeah. But Prompto. I meant what I just said. _You can’t hold yourself responsible._ That just doesn’t make any sense. Children are dumb. I should know that, too.”

Prompto can’t look at her, at any of them, for long. “Then why didn’t I try harder to get away? Seven years, Noctis. Seven years. They gave me food and pretty clothes and, and the drug. They chained me to my bed. Why didn’t I try harder to get away?”

“Stop,” Noctis says.

Prompto does, and she pulls up her knees, and hides her face in her own skin and bones.

“Tell me what they wanted you for.”

She looks up despairingly at Aulea. “They wanted to put a pretty face on the family. Like, like you, someone who looks like a leader, and, and like her, young, someone whom they could parade around and dress up and show off.”

She tilts her head in Noctis’s direction.

“I -- see.”

“I wasn’t being trained to command people though.” The laugh bubbles out of her, ugly, hysterical. “You know what they really wanted me for? You know why I was being given the drug? They wanted to break me just enough so that, that I would stop caring about, about the thing that Ardyn was going to do on the side. Just, just as soon as he thought he could get away with it. Just as soon as he thought I could take it.”

“You don’t have to say it,” she hears Aulea say, words gone bleak and small. “I know Ardyn.”

Better to say it out loud, anyway. “So you know he was planning to turn me into his own personal party favor. Worse. His pet blackmail bait.”

“Yes.”

Prompto turns her head, and feels the sob trying to tear its way out of her, and the next thing she knows, she’s weeping in Noctis’s arms. 

“I wanted to die,” she gasps. “And I wanted to live. I’m both of those things now. Dead and alive. But, but last night, I said I needed to be killed because, because then Ardyn wouldn’t look for me. I think. What do I know. Obviously I’m not dead, but, but my brain is also telling me, why am I not dead? I killed Loqi last night. It was the last thing I did before I ran. He asked me to kill him and, and I did. Jammed my gun up against his jaw and fired. And I killed someone else so I could, I could escape on a stolen bike. Why am I not dead, too? Why didn’t they just kill me? Why didn’t you? Why didn’t I?”

“Prompto.”

The words drop away from her as she looks up again.

Noctis is so, so close: the fine hairlined scars wrapped in strange arcs around her neck. The beauty mark low on her right cheek, near the corner of her mouth. Long fine eyelashes, and the shadows of them on her skin. The line of her brows, pulled down and into a straight line. The pain in her eyes, and something even harder than pain, something even fiercer, that Prompto can’t put a name to.

“You with me?”

Prompto nods, wordlessly.

“Good. So, it’s okay. You can tell us the rest of the story another time. You can, just, you want to rest?”

“I don’t know.”

“Bet you don’t want to be here, though,” and that’s Cindy, speaking from over Noctis’s shoulder. “Not in this room.”

“Mother,” she hears Noctis say.

“I honestly don’t know.” Aulea’s presence is moving away. Is heading for the door. “But -- you will do with her as you see fit, and I will step in if I must. Until then, I trust your judgment. And if I must judge, then you’ll trust mine. Fair?”

“Fair.”

Cindy, too, is walking out: Prompto can see the bright colors of her on the move. “I’ll see to the rooms.”

“Thanks, Cin,” Noctis says.

Hand, moving gently, in Prompto’s hair.

“Hair dye?” she hears Noctis ask, after a moment.

“I missed a spot,” Prompto mutters.

“No. You didn’t. But, but I wondered. Contact lenses, you see. You have very, very vivid eyes, when you’re not covering them up. And then there’s these,” and Noctis is laughing, soft and not at all unkind.

Prompto starts when she realizes Noctis is touching her eyebrows. 

“You’re blonde here.”

“I am,” Prompto mutters. “Yeah. I said I was dumb, didn’t I? I never even thought about my eyebrows. Fucking giveaway right there on my fucking dumb face.”

Soft soothing noises, trembling gently into her. “Not dumb. You’ve just had a really, really bad night. And it was a long night, too, like, as long as seven years. So now it’s morning and you’re waking up. And we can help you with that. But, hey, look on the bright side: you’re dead now.”

“Am I?”

“Yeah. Dead at my hand, too. I -- I have a reputation,” Noctis is saying with a small and quiet laugh. “I’ll tell you all about it, I promise.”

“Not now,” Prompto whispers.

“No, no, not now. We’re not even moving until you tell me to. Although, you know, my rooms are better than this.”

“Why are you kind to me?”

“I need a reason to?” 

Again those soothing movements of fingers running over her scalp.

Prompto turns her cheek into the vee of Noctis’s open collar, against the ink and the bare skin, and breathes.


	3. Chapter 3

_Don’t get mad at me, okay? Sorry I have to run off on you. There’s an informal meeting I have to get to and I’ve actually been looking forward to it, and there’s things Mother and I need to work on, so I maybe won’t be around when you wake up. I’m going to tell someone to show you how the place works, though, so don’t be surprised, and don’t be afraid. And don’t think I’m telling them to watch you, either. They’re just going to be there to make sure you know your way. People get lost at headquarters sometimes, sorry it’s such a fucking labyrinth. Oh. And have you given any thought to -- your disguise? It sounds so dramatic when I say it like that: but the you that was wearing a suit and black hair dye and brown contact lenses is dead, and now you can wear something else. You can be someone else. If you’re interested in that kind of thing. I’ll probably try to explain that to you again. Don’t laugh when I fail, okay? Anyway. See you soon. Noctis._

She reads the note for the third time, and then for the fourth. Weight of it in her hand, creamy thick sheet covered in a fine grid of dark red dots, and the letters like cramped and angular flourishes in gray ink.

Her name is somewhere in the middle of the other side of the sheet: the note had been folded carefully into thirds and left next to a glass of water on the side table, waiting for her to wake up from another night of restless dreams, another night of waking up and weeping.

Her eyes itch, and her head feels clogged and full of fuzz, and she reaches for the water. 

No matter how many times she peers into the glass, the water stays clear.

No tinge of red in the last remaining drops.

Not for the first time, she looks around her and doesn’t recognize a single thing: only the outlines of her own body in the sheets, and the pattern that wraps around her. Thin black and gray lines twining in wide rows, making her think of graceful currents in a swift-moving river -- the rows spaced evenly like stripes, and every now and then the stripes are interrupted by long lines of tiny purple flowers. Five petals on some and six on the others, and yellow centers. 

Duvet kicked down to the foot of the bed, elaborate red honeycombed in thick gold stitching.

She runs her hand over the wrinkles in her pillows, the wrinkles in her sheets, and reads the note again, and the thought of being disguised is -- it might be a good idea, today.

So she leaves the warmth of the massive bed, its four bedposts linked by streamers of ivory lace.

Her face in the mirror in the bathroom: she sighs, and frowns, and here and there she can see spots of blonde roots in her dyed hair.

“What was the point?” she asks, and there are no answers forthcoming.

Shower and scrub. Dark blue eyeliner, and only a little lip gloss.

Clothes, she thinks. It’s awkward, wearing Noctis’s clothes: they’re mostly of a size except around the hips and the shoulders, and -- what does she want to be, now?

Quiet, of a sort, in the days since her escape: but she can still vividly remember the pinch in Noctis’s face, in Cindy’s, as they told her Ardyn had torched his own compound and cut a murderous swath through his own ranks. 

“If only he’d finish himself off, he’d be doing us a favor,” Noctis had said.

“He torched the place and now he’s going to rebuild -- that scam’s older than the hills,” Cindy had said. “And now his people will be worse than they ever were.”

And Prompto had said nothing. Only turned her tears to the wall.

But there had been no word of Ardyn looking for her.

Had they convinced him?

And she sees the shiver in her own hands, in the here and now, as she ties the belt on the pinstriped dressing gown that Noctis had pressed on her, as she regards the clean shining mess of her hair morosely.

Knock on the door: one impact, and then two. 

“Anybody in there?”

She trips out of the bathroom and -- entirely on instinct -- reaches for her small gun, and holds it behind her back as she touches the doorknob. “What do you want,” she asks, quietly.

“Good, you’re awake. You want something to eat?”

Deep male voice.

It seems to be coming from over her head.

“Who are you,” she asks.

“Amicitia, Gladiolus. Don’t know if Aulea’s mentioned me to you yet. I’m her bodyguard.”

She shakes her head even when there’s no one to see her. “Then why haven’t I seen you around?”

Rumble of a laugh. “Good question. And the answer to that is, I’ve been looking after my dad. He’s been in the hospital for a couple of weeks. He’s doing fine now, though. So I’m back. And now I’m supposed to be meeting you. Noctis said so, and Aulea backed her up.”

Prompto thinks about it. “I’m hungry,” she says, “but I have nothing left to wear.”

“I can help you with that. You don’t even have to let me in. Just, I got to pass you a few things.”

“I’m armed,” she says.

“Doesn’t bother me. It’s better if you stay armed,” the male voice says. “Can’t be too careful these days.”

“Yeah.” And she pulls open the door.

Rocks back on her heels, and looks up.

“Call me Gladio.” Long dark hair in loose waves. Shoulders straining the seams of a plain dark-blue shirt. Faded jeans, crosswise slashes in the knees. Black leather jacket folded over one arm, and a paper bag in that hand -- which he holds out to her. “And -- special delivery. For you.”

“Somehow I can’t see you wearing -- lace,” Prompto says, after a quick peek into the bag.

“Not a fan of that kind, to be honest with you,” is the surprising response. “I prefer the stuff my sister makes. Crochet lace. Stuff like that.”

She blinks at him. “Sister?”

“Iris.”

“Oh. Okay. Come in?” 

“Thanks.”

“I’m Prompto,” she offers, after a moment. “I don’t really know if my last name is Argentum though. If I had another name, I can’t really remember it now.”

“Gotcha. You’re Prompto. Good to meet you.”

She watches him sit down -- there’s only one actual place to sit in the room, and that’s the oversized loveseat placed kitty-corner to the bed, and he only has eyes for his mobile phone. 

“Um?” she can’t help but ask, as she lays her gun aside.

“Yeah, no, you do whatever it is you do to get dressed, I got a book here, you don’t have to rush,” he says.

“Okay.”

She retreats to the bathroom, and stares at the contents of the bag. Plain black underwear, for which she’s wordlessly grateful. The sleeveless top is high-necked and made of layers: dense red lace over soft knitted ribbing. Skinny trousers in dark-gray leather, butter-smooth against her skin. In the bottom of the bag is a separate mesh pouch, and a pair of shiny black penny loafers with red soles falls out of that pouch.

She runs her hand through her hair and steps out again, once she’s dressed.

“Hmm,” is the first thing Gladio says, and she tilts her head at him.

“No?”

“Hair,” he says. “I can tell that’s a dye job. Black doesn’t suit that.”

“I can’t be blonde any more.” She slides her gun into the little holster that Cindy’s loaned her, and buckles the whole thing on around her waist.

“I know. Aulea told me that bit, too. You talked about hair colors with anyone yet?”

“I haven’t even been able to think about it,” she says, quietly.

“Oh. Okay. Sorry. Shouldn’t be pushing you. Iris said.”

“I remember her, but I don’t remember talking to her.”

Quiet chuckle. “Nah, I get that. Noctis is running around and shit, which means Iris is running around with her. Watching her back. That’s what we do.”

Despite herself she feels her eyebrow tick upwards.

“Amicitias,” he explains. “Not just Iris and me. It’s been all of us. Well. Ever since there’s been a Lucis Caelum family, doing what it does.”

“Which is what exactly? I mean, I get it, it’s fucking dangerous if your last name’s Lucis Caelum, you can’t exactly go out alone,” Prompto says, and somehow she’s following him as he gets to his feet and steps out the door, and the corridors wind and twist around, until she steps into a gallery of windows and late-morning sunlight -- and she stops, and can’t help but stare.

“I didn’t know this place was -- ” she begins.

Keeps looking because the ground, glimpsed through tinted glass, is a very long way down.

“Yeah, it takes some getting used to, doesn’t it,” Gladio offers, and he’s leaning against a nearby beam, hands in his pockets. 

“Can you see your home from here?”

“Serious question?”

She shakes her head.

“Thought so. You wanna know who we are though, is that it?”

“If it’s not like, a secret or something,” she mutters, shifting from foot to foot.

“Nah, pretty much everyone knows about us. We were originally from out of Insomnia. Just got swept along into the whole mess, which started when my great-great-great-whatever-grandmother allied with -- well. The woman who founded Noctis’s family. Things went on from there,” he says, and she watches him shrug. “What the Lucis Caelums do, what they’ve done from the start, it’s a bloody life. They just happen to call it their family business too. You know about the bad old days of Insomnia?”

She grits her teeth. “Assume I don’t know anything,” she says, because it’s only the truth, even when it hurts to admit it.

Sharp look in his eyes, that she does her level best to ignore.

But he clears his throat and says, “Well, what you’re seeing now, it’s kind of how it has always been, here. I don’t mean the skyscrapers, I don’t mean the people and the, the gangs. I mean: Insomnia’s been dying for years. Maybe decades. There isn’t even much of a country around it left. And people on the move -- I find there are two kinds of them. Either they cling to their own, to the things and the people that they think are familiar; or they try to make something new of themselves and of the world they find themselves in.”

“I know about that second one.”

“Yeah. So.”

Flight-lines in Prompto’s vision, and she watches the wheeling sweep of a dozen birds as they flash past, and then they’re gone, too, with only the faint echoes of their screeching song left behind them.

“So,” she says. “Amicitias. Lucis Caelums. Which side are you guys on?”

Shrug, again. “I can’t tell you what the others think. Not Aulea, not my dad, not even Iris. I can only tell you what I believe in. And that starts with: I grew up here. Maybe I wasn’t born here, how would I know? But I know Insomnia. Insomnia’s been all I’ve known. And I don’t want Insomnia to die. 

“But there are very sick and very rotten parts of it, and those, those need to go. Because what’s the point, if they don’t? If the sick parts eat the rest of the city, then there’s no more city, period. Might as well just tear the whole fucking thing down, set fire to the ruins, go somewhere else and start the fuck over. But I’d rather cut out the rotten bits and see if the city’ll hold together after. You know?”

She growls, softly. “That’s irony for you. Ardyn and the other families who do what they do. Like cancer, eating up Insomnia.”

“Why is that ironic?”

“Ardyn’s got cancer.”

Low whistle, as Gladio sets off again. “Oh. Yeah. That’s -- that should have been funny, maybe.”

“It is, and it’s not,” she mutters.

“Yeah.”

She follows him down another stretch of carpets and doors branching, and then he walks through a half-open doorway. 

Five tables stretching the length of the room, and benches to sit at, and she watches as Gladio waves at a handful of men and women sitting with their plates and their glasses and -- she can hardly fail to notice -- ballistic vests in a neat heap, and different kinds of guns.

Pinch, low in her belly, and it’s a surprise, again, being hungry. 

“Coffee?”

She nods.

Table near a corner and a large steel urn. Bitter-fragrant wreathing steam, warming her up from the first sip. It bolsters her, gives her strength, and she watches as Gladio doctors his cup with way too much creamer and sugar. 

Then she steps in his wake toward a long sideboard, and in no time at all she’s sitting down next to him, heaping plates before them.

An elderly woman points them in the direction of another side table, and a forest of mismatched drinking glasses, and several pitchers.

The cutlery is scratched in places, but the pieces are bent and heavy in a way that makes her think they’re used often, and they’re looked after often.

“So what is it you do,” he says, as she’s mopping up curry gravy with a slice of roasted potato. 

“What do you do,” she fires back, “aside from be disturbingly tall and wide? Like a damned wall?”

He laughs, and she tucks her smile firmly behind her hand.

“Good one,” he says, after a moment. “And to answer your question, yeah, fair to say I’m Aulea’s wall. I’m her shield. She goes out of this place, I walk in front of her. Pretty simple. Crowe and the others, they watch her back. They have their place, I have mine. I know where I’m supposed to be. And maybe it’s bragging, but yeah, I guess I’m doing pretty okay, since she’s still alive.”

“Iris does the same thing for Noctis?”

“Yeah. And Cindy and Ignis know a lot of things about Noctis, and they sort of walk around the edges, they watch her sides, you know what I mean?”

She shakes her head.

“Ah come on,” and he laughs, a little. “I sort of know them a little, and sort of don’t. We don’t hang together, you know? For starters, Aulea isn’t even supposed to travel outside our territory any more. I mean, going out, that’s where some of her scars come from. And mine too,” and he points to his own face. To the intersection of the deep scars, one running across his forehead and the other cutting down his left cheek.

“I didn’t want to pry,” she says, quietly.

“Okay. Yeah. But, you maybe understand. Five times she travels into the other parts of Insomnia and two times out of five, she gets ambushed. I don’t mean little spur-of-the-moment car chases and shit, like people saw her and decided they’d take their chances right there on the spur of the moment. I mean, people were making plans to off her. They were actively waiting for her to go out of this place. Roadblocks and waiting, and big fucking guns, and all that.”

She winces when he does. “I think I get it. But, but wait a minute. Aulea getting ambushed, that makes a sick kind of sense. But, but why aren’t people doing the same for, for Noctis?” Blink. Blink. “I mean. Um. The night we met. I don’t even know where that was. I was out of it for most of the night. But I kind of remember it was a long ride to get here and, and, was that even still Lucis Caelum territory?”

“So you were paying attention after all.” Salute with the coffee cup. “You have a good eye. And no, it wasn’t. Near as I can tell, she was, you were, skirting the edges of the Stormland neighborhoods.”

“Stormland?”

“Nyx Ulric’s people. They’re all right, just, they’re pretty unhinged sometimes. Not in a bad way, I think. Anyway. We’re cool with them, last I heard. But yeah, why does Noctis get free run of the city when her mom’s being actively watched and all that? Nah, forget watched. Aulea’s being hounded. So why isn’t Noctis? Well, that’s because she did this thing, about three years ago.”

He lowers his voice.

“Not going to bore you with the details of what Drautos was doing, just gonna tell you, he was planning to betray at least Aulea to -- someone else. He was one of the, well, I guess he’d have been part of the inner family if he hadn’t been such a shifty asshole that we all wanted to be wary of him. It wasn’t just me, or my dad, or even Iris. It was pretty much everyone Aulea trusted. We couldn’t trust him, and we couldn’t actually say why. 

“But -- that’s not new, is it? That’s something we do every now and then, state of the city, you know? State of the family. We’ve done it to others. What was new, what was evil, was that the bastard suddenly broke away and took some of our own people with him. Fled to the outskirts of Insomnia, really close to the neighborhoods held by, oh, that had to be the Armaugh group at the time. So what does Noctis do? She goes straight to the guy in charge and asks, very nicely, for permission to wipe out Drautos.”

She’s leaning in despite herself. “And by _ask nicely_ you mean?”

“What?” She watches him blink at her. “What’re you talking about? She really did just go and have a very formal and very polite conversation. Like some kind of diplomat. She asked for permission to go about in Armaugh territory, and she even made some kind of promise to, like, pay back any damage she caused? I think that was the only part Aulea was making pissy noises about, we didn’t exactly have anything to back that up with at the time.

“Took her, I think, a week, and she was risking her life every day, traveling through those neighborhoods, and even Cindy was talking about coming home and letting the Armaughs take care of shit. Obviously that didn’t happen because Drautos got cocky and he went after Noctis with everyone he had -- he thought he could take her, you know? Just her and her three guardians? He had about two dozen people with him. He made the mistake of thinking the numbers were on his side.”

Prompto’s almost forgotten how to breathe, with the way he’s telling the story. “He didn’t?”

“Fuck no. Long story short. Noctis cut her way through every single one of Drautos’s soldiers -- please remember they used to be our people, they were supposed to know how she fights and all that, they were supposed to know Iris and Cindy and Ignis, too. But no dice. Noctis dealt with the whole sorry motherfucking lot of them -- just took them all out -- and then she went to the damn trouble of taking Drautos’s sorry ass to Weskham. He’s the leader of the Armaugh group, and rumor has it he used to run with, that would be Noctis’s grandmother.

“And Noctis went to him, to Weskham, and said something like, this is the person I was looking for, will you allow me to deal with him, please and thank you?”

She laughs, suddenly. She can’t help it. 

The Noctis that Gladio is describing is exactly the Noctis she’d met: ruthless and weirdly polite, despite the profanity. Despite the smoking guns and the bloodstains on her boots.

Gladio’s grinning, now, too. “Cheeky little shit, right? Must’ve been the only reason they let Noctis and her team come back without so much as a scratch. They even gave her some kind of escort. By then the entire city knew the story. All the families knew. All the leaders were paying attention. And you better believe she knew that, too, because she took Drautos right to the doors of this very building and yelled out his crimes for the entire family to know. Like, she just came on right out and talked, and explained the whole thing. Damn ballsy move if you ask me. And also clever: because she said outright she knew where the family’d fucked things up and allowed the bad shit to happen. Because she said outright she wanted the family to know where it had to do better.

“When she stopped talking she just stood there, and she waited for Aulea and me to come down the stairs: and that was when she said, hey, I’m taking it upon myself to deal with this piece of shit, you got any last words for him?”

“What did Aulea say?”

That smile turns dark, and she doesn’t flinch away. “Say? Nothing. Didn’t need to, really. She just spat in Drautos’s face.”

“Nice,” she says.

“I thought so too. And then Noctis grinned at her and turned back to Drautos and -- well she didn’t have any words for him, either. She just shot him. Bang bang, right between the eyes.”

Prompto thinks for a moment. “And as a result of that -- Insomnia respects her?”

“In that odd and twisted way we can respect each other, yeah. Doesn’t stop people from taking potshots at her. But honestly, are you really that brainless you’d want to go after someone who’d go to, to ridiculous and fucking polite lengths to get what she wants? Okay, if you’re that dumb, then it’s your funeral.”

“Literally,” Prompto says.

And she pushes up from the table, and leans forward on her hands, and says, “Iris is Noctis’s shield, so she walks in front. Cindy and Ignis guard Noctis’s sides. Which leaves one thing, maybe the most important thing. Her back: who is watching her back? Does she even need someone to watch her back?”

“Always,” is the immediate reply. “I don’t worry about her front, that’s Iris’s job and she’s damn good at it, and I know I can’t do any better than her. Noctis’s back, though? Different story entirely. I’d put an entire army behind her if I could.”

“I’m not an entire army.” She closes her eyes and bites her tongue for only a moment. “I will never be as good as an entire army. But. But I’m a start. Yeah? So I’ll need to train. And -- maybe I need to dress better than this.”

“Hey, watch it, Iris picked that out for you,” she hears Gladio say as he gets up, but he’s laughing as he says it.

She glares, half-heartedly, and remembers Noctis’s note. “I know that. I’ll say _thank you_. But: disguise. It’ll work better if I pick it out myself. Right? The whole thing. Everything about me.”

Brows pulling down, pulling in. Worry, like deep lines in his tanned face. “Whoa, whoa, slow your roll there. No one asked you to, what, change everything about yourself in one damn morning.”

“I can’t do that.” She hangs her head. “I can’t think of it, it’s such a big thing. I can’t process but bits and pieces of it. But I have to start somewhere. I can, now. I think.”

“Oh. Well in that case.”

She looks up.

“If that’s what you mean,” Gladio says, warmth in his smile. “Then I can get behind it. Get behind you. So, come on. Only takes a minute to get things like, like a car.”

She blinks, then. Frowns. “Money. I don’t have any.”

“No need to worry about that. You’re one of us, right?”

“Am I?”

“They talked to you, didn’t they? Noctis and Aulea. I know because Aulea mentioned it. They talked to you, and all that. You’re one of us and we take care of our own. And hey. Whatever it is you want to do, like watch Noctis’s back: that’s something we need, and that’s something you can keep in mind. You need supplies for that. So that’s what we’re going out for.”

“You make it sound like I’m actually a reasonable person,” she says, laughing softly. “Like I actually know things like, logic, and rational thought.”

“Better you than me,” is the instant response.

And for some reason that makes her want to punch him, so she does, though all it does is hurt her knuckles, and it doesn’t even seem to move him at all.

“Awwww, come on! Do it again!”

A new voice, sweetly amused -- and the jacket is familiar, but not the waistcoat in its low scoop and its skull-and-lace print over the black shirt, or the flyaway tartan hems of the pleated skirt. 

“Iris,” she hears Gladio say. 

And she steps aside, grinning, as Iris runs around Gladio and then scrambles up his back, hanging on from his shoulders. 

“Good hunting?” he asks, as he reaches over his shoulder and ruffles Iris’s wild windblown hair.

“We came back alive, that’s all we wanted,” she hears Iris say. “But Prompto punched you. And I didn’t hear the joke.”

“He doesn’t want to be sane, your brother,” Prompto offers, when Iris gets back down to her feet, and turns her grin on her. 

“No, no, what the fuck,” Gladio says, chuckling. “You said, it’s like you’re a reasonable person, and I said, better you than me.”

“Punch him again,” Iris laughs.

Prompto covers her grin, and shakes her head. 

And then: “What’s this?”

“We’re going out,” Gladio says. “I’m taking Prompto shopping.”

“Oh are you?” And Noctis steps into view, and -- she’s wearing a suit. Most of a suit. Black and gray jacket, and red seams in her trousers, and a red ribbon tied into a flower-shape, stuck into her buttonhole.

She’s not actually wearing a shirt beneath the jacket.

Prompto makes herself stand still, even as Noctis is walking towards her, deliberately slow. 

“I think you’re just fine as you are now,” she hears Noctis murmur, and that voice is just as low and compelling as that day in the cell, but now -- now it’s sultry, too, rich rasp.

“Yeah, sure, she looks fine now: but she still needs more clothes,” she hears Gladio say.

Which reminds her: Prompto feels the flush creep up her cheeks as she turns toward Iris. “Thanks for this,” she says, and tugs on the hem of her top. “I, I like these a lot.”

“Go add some more to your collection,” is Iris’s response, laughter like silver chimes. “And I’ll keep Noctis here so you can surprise her later, okay?”

“Iris,” Noctis says.

“Go, Prompto, shoo,” Iris says.

And Prompto turns back at the last minute. Looks Noctis in the eye, and taps her own chest, over her heart. “May I borrow that?”

Blink, blink, midnight-blue eyes clouded with confusion for a moment -- and then Noctis pulls out her ribbon, her corsage. Holds the unraveled length of it out with a smile.

“Thanks.” 

She ties it on around her left wrist, one loop and two, before she knots it in place -- eyes on Noctis’s all throughout. 

One of the siblings whistles, long and low and amused.

“Let’s go,” Prompto says, and then there’s an impulse rising in her and she gives in to it: she winks at Noctis. 

She turns away, to the rising laughter of Gladio and Iris, and the mad tripping beat of her own heart.


	4. Chapter 4

Awareness filters back in, slowly: the cold of the room that clings to every inch of her skin, despite the layers of tank top and long-sleeved shirt and tights and double-vented skirt. Despite the jumper she’d found at the foot of her bed, a thick cloud-puff of warmth that clings to her shoulders and to her wrists, and skims the rest of her body. 

She files the cold away, files the idea of wearing her own clothes away, and keeps breathing in the slow and steady rhythm she prefers when she’s in this place. Sharp tension in her shoulders and in her upper arms, in the joints of her elbows and her wrists, that she forces out on the next long exhale. 

That the range is soundproofed to begin with is not the thing that lingers in the back of her head: that she’s completely deaf to the outside world, is. Earplugs and earmuffs and, an extra from one of the guys milling around in the prep room adjacent to this space, a sort of face mask that also absorbs the sounds of her breathing, so she’s completely muffled.

What makes this different is that she’s chosen to do so: she’s chosen to whittle down all her other senses to the barest minimum, the barest sliver required to function, so she can see as clearly and as coldly as she can.

She blinks, blinks, rapidly, catching her thoughts in the half-seconds of darkness, pushing all the rest of the world away. Narrowing down, focusing, and now she allows herself to feel the weight in her hands. 

Different sort of gun, entirely, this. Where she’d escaped her prison with nothing more than a backup piece, a tiny snub-nosed thing that she’s locked and left behind in the small suite of rooms that she now occupies, this one is -- well, it’s full-sized, for one thing, matte black against her dull red gloves, her bared fingertips. Extended magazine, she’d requested that, and empty railings. 

In her nightmares she still sees the image of herself, desperate and on the run and outlined in a storm of laser-sight beams: so she’d firmly and politely declined the senior armorer’s offer of that particular nicety, when she’d first checked out this gun, despite the odd look on the old man’s face. Little glowing dots are more than enough to sight with, she thinks, and unthinkingly she shakes her hands slightly to the right and peers downrange again, three white dots aligned in a straight line, and the x-ring of the target posted up at the other end is nothing more than a blur.

More than just awareness, she thinks, more than just focus. She needs to be in the here, in the now, indelibly and completely present in the moment before she takes one more deep breath and then -- finger to the trigger, three and two and one and -- 

Even her awareness of her body drops away, and she knows she’s compensating for all the recoil and all the little actions of reacquiring her target, all the little actions of catching her breath and resetting her fingers, the movement of her eyes, the set of her shoulders -- she knows all of this and she doesn’t, because she’s focused on obliterating her x-ring.

When the pistol clicks on an empty magazine, it’s a shock and it isn’t: some part of her mind must have been counting the bullets, and the rest of her must have just kept on going and going until she couldn’t go on any more.

Maybe there’s a metaphor in that, and maybe not -- but she shakes her head to clear the thought away, and it only takes her a moment now to disassemble the gun so it’s ready for her to clean, and only after that does she take off her ear protection, and pull the mask away from her face.

Here is the target she was shooting at: she cranks it back and the mechanisms slide along smoothly, pulling it back towards her, and she takes a long hard look at the black silhouette, the thin sliver-lines of scoring circles. Ragged hole in the center, that only makes sense, except for the one single outlier, the hole that she’s managed to place neatly between the eyes of the human-shape.

One bullet or two, she can’t tell -- and neither can she remember.

On a rolling chair nearby, hard plastic seat cranked up to its tallest position, there’s a box padded with foam and she carefully places the pieces of the gun into the recesses, into the hollows, and she closes up the box before taking her target off its rails.

Face mask off, and she folds it with one hand and sticks it into the pocket of the sweater as she crosses out of the range -- no one else in there with her, which is not really a surprise considering the late-or-early hour -- and there is also no one in the armory proper when she picks a spot at one of the long polished steel tables, when she grabs some of the supplies that she’ll need to care for the pistol. Rags and brushes, oil, wipes for her hands. 

She almost always uses her spent target to cover the surface she works on, when she’s cleaning the firearm she’s been using -- where had she even learned to do that? And there’s no way for her to know if it’s some kind of strange economy that lingers in her mind, the thought of making use of everything she has. No way of knowing, no way of remembering: so she loses herself in the routine, instead, and goes to pick up a fresh magazine from the labeled racks, and putting the gun back together is a puzzle that she can solve without even seeing the parts that she’s clicking into place. 

Somewhere between wide awake and all thoughts wiped away as she checks the levers and mechanisms and makes sure she hasn’t actually loaded the damned thing -- and in the moment before she thrusts the pistol into the holster that’s riding her hip, hidden in her layers -- 

“Done?”

The moment shatters.

The tension coils and coils tighttighttight in her chest, sharp edges brushing her heart, and it’s a near thing that she doesn’t cry out -- somehow the gun is down on the table and somehow she’s standing on her own two feet, wavering -- hands clamped over her mouth, and all she hears is the thin near-wail that rattles her teeth --

Ignis Scientia: eyes the many different greens of a carefully tended garden. Careworn lines around his eyes, around his mouth, joining all the other scars and spots in his face. Ash-blond hair fallen towards his collar, clinging to his cheekbones. Clinging to the rolled too-shiny edges of the huge burn scar that seems to take up the entire left side of his face. 

Henley in heathered gray, short-sleeved, its dark-blue yoke spanning his shoulders. Dark-blue jeans. This must be casual dress for him, she thinks; nothing he’s wearing right now resembles his usual outfit of shirt and suspenders and pressed trousers. Holster secured around his right thigh, ammunition pouches to match -- and there’s an additional set of straps around his midsection, that she knows leads to the pair of knives he carries in the small of his back.

Glasses gleaming in the harsh cast of the overhead lights, and bare hands -- and she can see, coiling around his right arm, one single magnificent feather, long and carefully inked into his skin, and she can see the details like the shaft-end. The artist’s flourish of the broken tip and the trailing black drops. The plume at the base of the feather itself and the long, long vane that terminates in a sharp point, which is nestled right in the crook of his elbow.

“What do I have to do,” she whispers, “to earn one of those?”

“I’m sorry?”

She curses the shiver in her hands that she can’t hide, even as she rechecks the safeties on the gun and finally shoves it into its waiting holster. As she pulls the hems of her sweater over it to hide its telltale shape, and then she’s making herself walk towards the man in the doorway. She’s making herself smile at him.

And maybe she doesn’t do so well, not with a smile so soon after she’s been scared out of her skin again, because Ignis’s face falls. Mouth thinning into a sharp line, and brows drawing together. “I -- forgive me. You would think I would have learned my lesson by now.”

“Please don’t apologize. I need to stop being less skittish,” she says, trying to ignore her panicked heartbeat. 

“I do not wish to bring up your past except in this case, because -- no one is expecting you to recover from your traumas overnight.”

“You been talking to Gladio? Because he said that to me, too. And for bonus points that was our first meeting,” she says, as she dodges around him, as she steps out into the corridor and she’s about to start walking away, about to head back toward her rooms, when she hears him clear his throat, when she hears his footsteps gaining on her. “Yeah?”

“You asked a question. I wished to answer.” He draws level with her, and she follows him when he veers away from the elevators, because he’s tracing the lines of his feather tattoo. Like he’s showing it to her. “You were speaking about this.”

“I only know Noctis has feather tats, too.”

Out of the corner of her eye, she sees him shake his head. “Not exactly. What she has is, is different. Difficult to explain. And she’s not here tonight, to explain it to you.”

“Lucis Caelum business, again,” she mutters.

“Yes. Both the ink that she wears, and the task that has been set her tonight. Soon enough you’ll know. I have every confidence in you, and in them as well.”

“Them -- who? Noctis and her mom?”

“It isn’t just up to them, you understand.”

She doesn’t pout, not exactly. Just pushes her lower lip out a little. “I could just go and tell them the whole damn story. Them, and, and. Whoever else it is that I have to explain to.”

Soft chuckle, and it doesn’t seem to be directed at her. “On that we’re agreed. Simpler that way. Clearer. I would prefer for the world to be that simple and that clear. But some of the other members of the family will say that they would rather err on the side of caution, that being one of the few reasons why they have survived to the present.”

“If you’re talking about dinosaurs, I’m curious,” she says, trying on a smirk for size. “If you’re talking about people, meh.”

“Well said,” he says, and he laughs some more, before he turns toward another set of elevators and ushers her in.

“Where are we going?”

His shoulders suddenly relax, and maybe he would never slouch like she would, like Iris sometimes does, but he does seem a little less tense, and he performs a little gesture around his pockets like he’s sweeping away the ends of a jacket he’s not wearing. 

“Someplace more congenial to a, a quiet conversation. That is, if you’re interested in such a thing? It’s up to you, of course.”

“I get a choice?” She tilts his head at his back, as he steps out of the elevator. The carpets are plush here, and she passes a pretty carved table and a small collection of lit candles in clear tumblers. 

The scents of lavender and sage trail in her wake as she turns a corner after Ignis.

And she follows in his footsteps and squints at the hushed echoes of her boots, and the serenity she’d found with the gun in her hands weathers away with each breath, and despite the lamps hanging from the walls she feels the hairs on the back of her neck stand, and stay standing.

Even if he were to turn around now, even if he were to look sad and chiding should he catch her in the act of chewing worriedly on her lower lip -- she can’t shake the feeling of foreboding that seems to follow her, here.

“Here we are,” Ignis says, as he stops next to a door and reaches into his pocket, and she sees him pull out a plain steel key, which is clipped to his belt loop on an ornate weathered chain. “Noctis asked me to show you where we live. I do not think she meant our, our private spaces; I think she meant that she wanted you to see where we spent our spare hours.”

“I don’t really understand that part. How can you guys have spare time?” she asks, but her thoughts trail off when she enters the room: when she takes in the wooden paneling and plain polished floors. Pool table, shadowed and silent beneath a light fixture shrouded in stained glass. Next to it, a handful of square tables and chairs to match, and she runs her fingers over the top of the first one she passes and these, too, are covered in the same worn and weathered felt as the pool table, and -- they must be card tables of some kind, she thinks.

That observation is confirmed when Ignis switches on a set of overhead lights -- low golden inviting -- near the other end of the room. Shelves behind the long wooden bar that he steps behind, and while she expects to see the serried ranks of bottles and all kinds of drinking vessels, she’s not really expecting the open boxes full of decks of playing cards. Poker chips in shallow glass bowls. In pride of place is a large leather briefcase, also propped open, so she can clearly see its contents: block-shaped tiles in green and golden-ivory, and the images carved into them in red and blue and green.

He says her name, then: “Prompto?”

Tall stools at the bar -- wood, here, where they were made of plastic in the shooting range. Green cushion on the one she takes, and she sighs, a little, and tries to work a kink out of her shoulder. 

“I frighten you, I suppose.”

She squints at his back. At the scar-lines, like the thrown-off branches of the old burn, threading the nape of his neck. No way of knowing if he’s making fun of her. 

What could she possibly lose for telling him the truth?

So she brushes her hair out of her face. “You suppose? Are you seriously asking me that question?” When the nervous giggle rises in her throat, she lets him hear it. “I mean. I like talking to you. I don’t know why you talk to me at all. Because of reasons. You’re Ignis fucking Scientia, aren’t you? Dude. I know all too well you might kill me for saying this, which is too bad because this is probably the only chance I’ll ever have to have this specific conversation with you. But I’m gonna say it anyway, because I don’t see any fucking point in lying to myself or lying to any of you, and you guys seem to have something of the same, which -- let me say this, too -- sounds perfect only when you’re talking to your allies, and those change on you far too often.”

“True.” Clink and clatter of glass on the move. “I agree with your assessment of our allies. The rest, I am still listening to. Please continue.”

“Truth is,” she mutters, “truth is, I came here to be safe. I came here and, and I thought, I thought I’d rather take my chances with literally anyone and everyone who wasn’t Ardyn Izunia or his people. And you guys just happen to be his fucking Enemy Number One, so I thought, that’s where I need to be, right? So what did I find when I got here? You all look like my sort of people. You all look like I might be able to trust you. All except, except you,” and now she thinks she might really want to stop talking, except the words come out anyway. “Except you: when you walk into a room, I still have a terrible urge to scream and run for my fucking worthless life.”

The details of him, where her last words have caught him in the act of turning back around: the grace in the straight set of his shoulders, that suddenly goes crooked with tension. The clench and release of his hands where he’s holding on to a glass bottle, unlabeled, and the liquid in the bottle moves, the currents outlined in swirling specks of something. 

Had it only been a few days ago when Noctis had asked her to ride in the backup car during a sortie along the western edges of Insomnia? And nothing had happened on that particular ride except for the burst of crude insults that some poor drunken ass had spewed in Noctis’s direction, as she stood on a shadowed street corner and talked quietly to a person who’d towered over her, and that even before taking into consideration that person’s scars, that weren’t quite obscured by the oversized hoodie -- and before Prompto could act, before Iris could finish putting herself between Noctis and the drunken ass, Ignis had leaped out of Noctis’s car and --

He’d passed his glasses to Noctis, who had, of all the things, taken a long step off the curb and into the gutter of that intersection -- and then he’d beaten the drunken ass’s face in, slowly and methodically, and he hadn’t even blinked even when the blood started to stain his fists, his sleeves.

Those same fists on the bar, where he’s put down the bottle and a pair of rocks glasses. 

She braces herself for a blow.

But when he does touch her, it’s with his fingertips, where her wrist is tense on the polished surface.

She looks up, and he has a lopsided smirk on.

And she can’t hold his gaze. She looks away. Mutters, “Sorry.”

“Whatever for? I don’t believe you said anything false, not about me anyway.”

Blink. She swings back to stare at him, knowing her jaw is hanging a little bit open. “Wow, you’re kind of vain.”

And he laughs, and he looks entirely too pleased with himself, she thinks: it’s in the crook of his eyebrow. It’s in the tilt of his mouth. 

Do they all have the same expressions? It’s an inane thought. Sharply, briefly, she regrets that they’re having this conversation here: since leaving the armory, since walking out of the firing range, she’s had no control over her thoughts, no way of focusing again. 

But her mind carries on, floating, idle -- how strange, she thinks. The slit-smiles she’s seen on Noctis, on Cindy, when they’re thinking out loud. When they’re considering things like dealing with another family, a different district in the city. Blood-red lipstick, outlining the edges of Noctis’s smile. Keen quiet focus, drawing the lines in Cindy’s face together. 

Has she seen enough of Iris to understand how she smiles? She’s not sure. Not for the first time, she wonders where Iris goes, why she leaves Noctis’s side. If Iris is Noctis’s shield, then why does she spend time away from Noctis? 

Ignis is coming back around the bar. He’s taking the seat next to hers. Lingering lines of his smile, and after he works his hand through his hair, he says, “Now I hope I have convinced you that when it comes to these conversations -- and I do hope you’ll have another, and another, and another, with me, and with anyone else you please -- you might do better to tell the truth. I promise you that I at least will not take your words amiss, as long as they are true.”

“I -- okay,” she says, slowly.

“One more thing,” he says, and now he sounds stern. He almost sounds like Aulea.

“Yeah.”

“I know that you have spent a considerable amount of time listening to -- meaningless words. To people who spoke to you for the very express purpose of belittling you. Who spoke to you precisely to tear you to pieces. I cannot fault you for listening to them, if they were the only people who spoke to you. I cannot blame you if you came to believe in those terrible things that you were told. Things like what you said, a minute ago. 

“But now, now that’s not true, is it? I hope you’ll try to listen to -- to Noctis, to Aulea, and to us, too. I hope you’ll consider our words, and perhaps come to believe in us. Prompto, you’re not worthless at all. You’re not. I hope you can try to listen to that. I hope you can try to believe it.”

“You don’t even know me,” she says.

“I don’t, not yet. I hope to. More to the point, however, Noctis and Aulea don’t think of you that way.”

She thinks about the kindness and the hard-edged sorrow of mother and daughter, the steely steady determination of them, and wonders.

“I -- I can try,” is all she says, however. 

“Good, and we have not settled the issue but perhaps we can lay it aside for the moment: now, won’t you drink with me?” Upward tilt of an eyebrow. “Unless you were planning to do anything else that was -- business-related.”

“Like what?”

“That does answer my question. I hope we are not boring you.”

“I don’t know what that means, honestly,” she says. “Sitting around, here, and -- doing things like target practice, or reading, or listening to the people in the dining rooms -- all of that is, in a way, sort of not doing anything. I said I didn’t understand the idea of you guys even having spare time at all. But all of those things, you know, even just the act of cleaning a gun -- it sure beats being locked into a room. Cuffed to a bed. Watched by cameras.”

He pushes a half-full glass towards her. “Better drink that, so you don’t have to think about it.”

“I will, but tell me what it is first.”

She hopes he understands why she has to ask.

All he does, that she can see, is bow his head a little. “It’s one of my favorite things to drink. It’s rice-wine, and it comes from, well, it comes from the little town where I was born. Away on the southern coast. The flecks in it are -- well, they told me it was gold. I have tended to take them at their word.”

“It doesn’t bother you, drinking _gold_? Seriously, are we talking about the actual metal thing?”

“We are. And I have been drinking that for years now. I like to think it hasn’t really harmed me.”

She eyes him, and then the contents of the bottle. “And it doesn’t bother you either, that I’m drinking this?” But she lifts her glass to her lips, and tastes the wine -- and it burns on the way down, a smooth burn that turns into a simmering sweet heat on her tongue. “Fuck,” she whispers, and she almost empties the glass on the next swallow. “Oh my god, is this why you like this stuff so much? Because that -- that is something powerful right there.”

“It is,” and she watches as Ignis finishes his drink off. He looks pleased. “Shall I pour another round? But this time I would like to propose a toast: to you, Prompto Argentum. And to telling the truth.”

“Let me,” she says, and her hands are steady: a bottle of liquor is a lot like a gun, after all, and she can be steady when she’s dealing with the latter. 

“Thank you. And I believe I had a few things I wanted to say to you. I was paying attention, you see.”

“Not a surprise,” she mutters. “Cindy said, you like to see everything.”

“It comes with the job.” She watches as he holds up his hand, and the first finger on that hand. “And the first thing I saw, when we were introduced, was the way you smiled. Forgive me, that that was the first thing I noticed. Can you blame me? You smiled at me as though you were trying to make yourself small and inoffensive, as though you were telling yourself that you didn’t have to run away. 

“And when Noctis showed up you smiled at her like you wanted to fall right into her orbit.”

She feels the heat flare up in her warm cheeks. “That obvious, huh?”

“If it helps, Noctis has a special smile for you, too.” 

“Special like?”

She can’t help but hang on his words. 

Can’t help but think about waking up again and again to the presence of Noctis still lingering in the air: the mornings of waking up to her actual presence, where she was reading by the lamp on the bedside table. The mornings of waking up to the wisp of her scent that lingered on the notes she liked to leave behind, pinned beneath the base of the same lamp.

“There,” she hears him say, and she blinks and stares at him. “That smile, just now. Your smile. You mirror each other. And, and I must say, I have had the privilege of standing by Noctis’s side for a few years now, and I have never seen her look so content before. Don’t get me wrong.” He drinks, pours again for himself, continues. “Noctis is who she is, and now that means that she is not unhappy, despite all these troubles roosting on her doorstep, on her mother’s shoulders. She carries her burdens and her cares with grace, as best as she can, and she tries to carry Aulea’s as well. But maybe you know the feeling of yearning for something precious. Something important.”

She chews on her lip again. “I do.”

“And so you might be able to understand how surprised we were when we started seeing Noctis smile, in that soft quiet way of hers, and we quickly understood that she was always smiling at you in that way. We were surprised, and -- I for one am pleased. Very pleased.”

And there is a softness in his features, suddenly, like lines swept gently away, like pain cooled and soothed -- even on the left side of his face.

Realization strikes her like the recoil of a bad shot, that gnaws down her nerves. “I -- you love her.”

“I have never made a secret of it -- even so,” and he sounds like he’s been caught off-guard. “Even so, it took a while for the others to guess. You have guessed it quite quickly: perhaps that is something you and I might have in common, that we hold the same person in high regard.”

“Oh my _god_ , am I getting in your way?” She nearly falls out of her seat. “Am I -- ? You got here first. Or she knows you better. Or something.”

“Hush. Be easy. Nothing of the sort at all.” Smile, small and true and a little vulnerable, she thinks. “It’s true, I do love Noctis. I have from the very moment I met her. But it is not what you think, or even how.”

She stares at the bottle of wine -- but she pushes her glass away. 

“You don’t want any more? Very well.” He is no longer smiling -- but he’s not frowning, either. “I will try to explain, as best as I can. It’s -- it’s as if on the day I met her I knew that I had found my life’s purpose. I knew that I wanted to be someone utterly worthy of her, someone she could rely on. I knew that these injuries -- ” He points to the left side of his face. “These were the least of the pains I could bear for her.”

She feels her eyes widen. “You got those in her service?”

“Immediately before. I threw myself in the path of an ambush. There were several cars involved, and by involved I mean there were multiple car crashes. These burns were the result.”

“Holy fucking god, Ignis.”

“I think I said something of the sort, myself,” he says. “And when I woke up after the whole thing had been said and done, I told Noctis that I didn’t mind putting on a repeat performance, as long as it meant that she would survive.” 

“I, I don’t know her very well yet, but I can’t think she was happy to hear that.”

Shrug. “Ask her yourself.”

She watches him set his own glass aside, and fold his hands atop the bar. “When I say I love her, I only mean that there is nothing else in this world that I want more than for her to be happy and to be alive and to have what she wants in her life. I feel pleased when she smiles at me. I feel happy to be her friend, and I feel rather proud of the fact that she confides in me. But I do not wish to think about -- being her lover, or being her beloved. I don’t feel any yearning for those things at all, or perhaps it might be nearer the mark to say that I am completely unmoved by those ideas. It’s enough that she trusts me. That she cares. I’m not looking for anything else, and I don’t want anything else.”

“You’re dead serious,” Prompto mutters, and she feels the passage of time in the draft that creeps in despite the lighting, despite the walls, despite the cozy shadows. She scrubs her hands roughly over her arms, over each shoulder in turn. “You -- you don’t want her. For real.”

Shake of his head. “I sincerely don’t. Not to slight her, or you -- or, indeed, anyone at all: but I simply cannot see the point. I know there is a point; I know people would do terrible and amazing things for that point. Have done so, and will continue to keep doing so. Love, lust, need, desire, however you want to frame it: these things are powerful. But I myself cannot perceive these things. And that’s why -- that’s why I wanted to speak to you about your, your feelings for her.”

“Not a shovel talk, I hope.”

He makes a face, then, and it’s actually funny: his eyebrows and the downturn in the corner of his mouth, and the twitch of his hand on the bar.

“Kindly put that notion out of your head,” and he might have started out with stern words, but he’s laughing, too, at the end of it -- enough that she grins and hides it behind her hand.

“Or else what,” she teases, then, and now she thinks she might be able to tease him, a little. “You going to kick my ass?”

“Noctis would thrash me if I laid an unkind hand on you,” he says, and she thinks he means it. “I only look like I’m not afraid of her.”

She laughs harder, and it takes a moment for that to die down, and Ignis is smirking at her at the end of it. 

“Feel better?”

“No, because you haven’t said anything else yet.”

She gets a quiet snort for that. “Smart mouth. You might as well use it to your advantage, when you’re around her.”

“How?” she asks, and then she does give in to the temptation to gesture at the spaces around them. “I know she’s paying attention to me. I know I’m paying too much attention to her. I’ve gone into a room and sort of wondered where in it she’s been, and that’s really nice and really confusing because I’ve been in her rooms, I’ve been in several places here in this entire fucking Citadel of yours -- of hers? -- and I keep thinking of her. Take this place for example: I came in and I started thinking, does she play pool? Does she play poker? What does she drink? I’m here, and I’m distracted, wondering what she’d look like if she was here right now.”

Ignis really is smiling at her expense, she thinks, when she looks back at him. “Noctis doesn’t have a poker face as much as she has a poker scowl,” he says in a perfect deadpan. “Cindy taught her how to play pool so don’t play against Cindy -- play against Noctis if you must. Oh, and it saddens me to report that Noctis did not inherit her mother’s talent at mah-jongg.”

“I don’t even know what that is, but -- good to know,” she says, and shakes her head.

“Your feelings for her, Prompto,” he says, after a moment. “Maybe everyone else in the family might be able to see them right in your eyes, but -- Noctis herself. How can you make sure that she knows how you feel?”

She scowls at him. “Easy for you to say. I don’t know why I like her or want her. I do, but -- what is the point of wanting, if I can’t figure out the fucking mess of my head first? And then that’s not the only problem. There’s also the unholy fucked-up mess of my heart to deal with. Like all hells I’m going to make her worry about my shit.”

“Noble, if profane. And I think I might see where you’re coming from. You’ve come out of a long dark night. You have no idea whether you can trust the sun or the blue sky or, or even the sunrise or the sunset. Something like that?”

“Yeah. And what is it with you guys and morning metaphors? I could’ve sworn I heard Noctis say something like that.” She pours herself a bare inch of rice-wine, and takes a sullen sip. “I think I’d do better by her if I could tell her how I feel when I’m sure of what those feelings are. I think I owe her that much. I don’t want to owe more than that.”

“Explain,” he says, but kindly, as he pours another round.

“I’m, I’m almost certain I have these feelings for her even when I also know I maybe kind of owe her my continued existence,” Prompto mutters into her glass. “And one of those should be much more important than the other. Something like that. I have to, I have to do something for myself first.” She looks up, then. “I have to convince myself that I’m going to be able to make it out of my nightmares -- and then, then maybe I can talk to Noctis with an actual clear head. Anything else, anything else wouldn’t be fair to her, you know?”

“I am listening,” she hears him say. “How can you convince yourself? How can we help you convince yourself?”

Her eyes catch on the pool table, and on the wall closest to it: the racked cue sticks on the walls, the clean-scrubbed chalkboard for tallying scores. In a box as cushioned as all the others she’s seen in this place, a dark three-cornered frame of wood, catching and corralling fifteen balls in familiar solids and stripes. 

Fifteen balls, catching the low lights of the room.

In her mind’s eye, she rearranges the fifteen: the triangle unravels and the balls become beads on a long, long doubled chain, doubled silver-and-gold links -- 

Solids and stripes.

She crosses away from Ignis, and doesn’t see the concern in the lines of his face -- over to the pool table, where she runs her fingertip over the solid white of the cue ball: solid white that, in the haze of her red-drug memories, slowly darkens, slowly changes colors.

And suddenly: she’s got it.

Whispers like rage, like leers, like terrible evil painful promises, and she covers her ears in the here and now, heedless of the alarm that rises in Ignis’s eyes, the sudden movement of him towards her.

Somehow she can block out the voices that are whispering -- the voices are not important -- the leers, the ravening smiles, they fall away from her.

She listens to the words.

Listens for the object named by all those words.

She closes her eyes and -- and she almost has it, she almost thinks she knows where it is. 

She turns back in the direction of the bar, before looking up. “Ignis?”

“Yes, Prompto.”

“How rare are blue pearls?”

The way he stares at her is almost satisfying -- the way he blinks, slow and maybe, maybe, just a little nervous. “I did not just hear you say that. I swear I did not.”

“Well then I’ll say it again,” she says, and she feels the shape and the sound of every word as it passes her lips. She feels the idea hit her like ten thousand bullet wounds all on target. “How rare are blue pearls? And how rare is a necklace made of perfectly matched blue pearls? How rare is it, do you think?”

“Extremely. As rare as, as one chance in a hundred lifetimes. In a hundred thousand. And -- this is one of those lifetimes.” She watches him blink again. “You can’t be serious.”

She grins like she’s drawing a bead on a target. “Go big or go home.”


	5. Chapter 5

“Prompto.”

She opens her eyes, and follows the line of the hand that’s wrapped around her arm, up and up and -- dark hair, faded lipstick the color of crushed plums, ink framing her throat and a gentle warmth in deep blue eyes, and she has to fight the very real urge to pull away, to hide, to beg for forgiveness.

Her heart knocks, knocks, knocks, painful sharp panicked rhythm against her ribs, even when she grits her teeth and tries to catch her breath, even when she clenches her hands into fists, even when she forces herself to get slowly and carefully to her feet. “Um. I still don’t feel comfortable calling you by your first name,” she hears herself say -- and she covers her mouth with a clenched fist, and feels her cheeks go cold and then hot.

“Then don’t.” 

When Aulea sits next to her, Prompto has to fight the very real urge to clear away the mess of papers and everything else on the table. Pieced-together maps marked up in several colors -- her mind races to decipher the code. Red for entry and exit points, green for security cameras and anti-intruder alarms, blue for personnel positions and routes and outposts. 

Rosters of names, filched from all over the city, the quiet stealthy labor of the past four weeks: but all the names have one thing in common, and that’s their affiliation with the Izunia ranks.

“Would you be comfortable,” Aulea asks, “if you addressed me by -- well, it isn’t my title, strictly speaking. But it is the one I’m expected to hold, and I have learned to respond to it. _Donna_ ,” she says, and Prompto hears the pause between the syllables. Hears the title, formal and cold and a weight of sound and gravity. Of authority. “If you called me _Donna_ , will it be easier for you?”

“Are you all -- called that? _Don_ , or _Donna_ , in the other families? Because we -- I -- never heard anyone say those titles inside. I mean. You know what I’m talking about, right? When I was with the, with the other people. They said something else.” She bites her lip and makes herself go on. “I refused to say it. I couldn’t make myself say it. That was the reason why -- why I was drugged every night. If I’d said it, if I’d called that person by the thing he wanted to be called, he said he would have spared me the drug.”

Her jaw hurts when she clicks her teeth together, angry, even now. “I never believed a fucking word he said.”

“Wise then, wise now,” she hears Aulea say, and there is a brief flare of hatred in those eyes, blank and hard and calculating, and quickly gone. “And I shall follow your example. We won’t say that name here, either. These walls have been witness to enough darkness, to enough mayhem. No need to darken them further.”

“What the hell did he think all this was, anyway? Some kind of sick game, so he could pass the days, and fuck everyone else, fuck this city, fuck the world?” Pain in her fists and she realizes, only after the fact, that she’s banged her clenched hands onto the table. “Was this just some kind of, of drug that would let him forget the tumors, the cancer?”

“I don’t wish to talk about it, and -- perhaps you need to get off the topic.”

“Can’t. Not completely. Not when -- ” Prompto looks her in the eyes. “Not when I assume, I assume you know what I’m about to do.”

“Not the details. I don’t wish to know about them. All I know is that you are about to do something reckless.”

Aulea’s worn smile does nothing to soothe the cold fear gnawing along her nerves -- or the sick giddy anticipation, gathering mass in her gut, so she can feel it like thorns, like claws, heaving and growing.

She scrubs her hands angrily through her hair, and again smells hair dye -- copper-hue of her disguised strands -- and she sticks her tongue out at the table.

“So why aren’t you stopping me?”

“Because it’s you. Because of the people you are going with.” Something amused in the shift of Aulea’s smile, the shift of the light in her eyes. “To be honest, I would have stopped you right at the start, right when you conceived of this scheme of yours. I would have stopped you if I felt that you were only planning a small and gratuitous attack. Something half-hearted. That would do no good to anyone, least of all to you. Knowing who your -- ah -- confederates were, however, I stayed my hand, and ordered the rest of the family to say nothing to Noctis. Ah. I am right in my assumption, am I not? That you are doing this for her?”

She knows she’s staring.

Aulea only laughs, soft and bitter and brief. 

And Prompto somehow manages to untangle her tongue long enough to say, “Only partly for her. This is, this is mostly a thing I want to do for me. This is mostly me trying to kick fucking Ardyn in the teeth. I don’t want to kick him in the balls, that’ll only get my boots dirty and it won’t hurt him for very long. I want to kick him in the teeth, I want to shatter his fucking face, that’ll do me for a start.”

That laugh fades away. That smile. Shadows in Aulea’s eyes. “Ah. Well. Now I really am glad I haven’t stopped you.”

She can’t look away from those shadowed eyes. “Why?”

“If your target had been anything else or anyone else. If you’d had any other reasons: I’d have ordered you to be taken back to that cell where you spent your first night. I’d have had you locked away for a short time, hoping that you would come back to your senses. Or, and this would have been the less savory option -- I’d have spoken to Cor Leonis. May I assume that you’ve heard of him?”

She blinks. “Yes. Sort of. They didn’t like him much, in the Izunia ranks. They jeered at him. I -- I thought, they said, he was the only actual cop still left in Insomnia? Because everyone else who might have been a cop was, was dead, or gone, or worse. I mean. There were all kinds of stories. But he couldn’t, he can’t -- can’t be bought, can’t be reasoned with -- ” She stares at the new expressions crossing Aulea’s face. “Of course. Stories.”

“Stories are lies or truths or both or even neither; it all depends on your point of view,” she hears Aulea say. “And in this case: the stories are wrong, or at least half-wrong. There is a way to reason with him. There is a way to, ah, make a deal with him. But that way is barred now, to this family and to all of the others still operating in and around this city.”

“Barred. Because?” And immediately after, she claps her hand over her mouth. Lowers her hand again. “I don’t think I should have asked you that question.”

“Normally, no, I wouldn’t be telling this story. But assume that I’m willing to answer your questions because I’m telling you the story. So.” 

Aulea shifts in her chair. She looks both older and younger: the smile that reaches her eyes, grave and puckish at the same time. “The way to him is, was, would have been me.”

Prompto stares. “What. You? What do you mean, you?”

“It is exactly as I’ve said. I would have been the way to buy him. I would have been the way to turn him off the straight and narrow path of the law. That was -- a long time ago. Do you want to hear the story?”

She nods, helplessly.

“I will keep it brief; there are only hours remaining before this task that you have chosen to undertake. You’re all right with that?”

“Yeah.”

And Aulea produces a flask from her pocket. “Would you like some?”

She shakes her head. “Even if I want to, and I do: not a good idea, is it?”

“That might be for the best. But: the story. Surely the others will have told you of Regis by now.”

“Noctis’s dad,” and Prompto nods. “The night you guys picked me up -- that was ten years to the day he’d been murdered.”

“By Ardyn Izunia. Yes. He wants me dead. He wants Noctis dead. And were he to somehow get his hands on either of us, on both of us, he would -- he would not be content with merely ending our lives in a hail of bullets.”

“I know.”

Sharp sharp glance. “Yes, you would. So. In the weeks and months after Regis’s murder we could only go on the defensive. We could only try to hold our positions at the time. Others tried to come after us, tried to whittle away at our forces, at our territories, at the places we could still hold. Some of our soldiers began to defect to other families; they didn’t believe we could weather that many assaults, for any amount of time. 

“We didn’t reach a breaking point, for which miracle I was and still am grateful. And part of that was because the, the police, those few who were still honorable, those few who were still interested in things like justice and safety and the welfare of the ordinary citizens of Insomnia, chose to -- not interfere with us.”

Blink. Blink. “They -- stood aside?”

“I will not boast that we were -- legitimate,” Aulea says. “We were absolutely the farthest thing from it. But the police saw that we were trying to hold our districts together, that we were trying to impose a kind of law, and a kind of order, in the neighborhoods where we still had some kind of influence. They chose to let us go on as we had already started. And I know who gave them the orders to that effect.”

“Someone told them to lay off of you,” she mutters. “Someone like, like Cor Leonis.”

“Yes.”

“So, he’s not, not really the last good cop in Insomnia. Strictly speaking.”

“Not strictly speaking,” and she watches as Aulea nods.

“You said,” and Prompto speaks slowly, “you were the way. Did you -- what was your actual connection to him?” 

“I knew him,” is the answer, quiet and matter-of-fact. “I knew him, before this, before all of this.” Wave of her hand that doesn’t even encompass the corner of the table, but it seems to extend all the way up and down, the entire breadth and height of the Citadel. “I knew him and, and for a time I thought that we might have been, hmm, bedfellows. We were certainly friends, and some nights, some days, we were a little closer than just that.”

She knows she’s staring. She knows she can’t look away. 

“Noctis’s father was, is, the only man I have ever loved,” Aulea says, and for some reason, Prompto knows she’s telling a very hard truth. “That will never be false. And I loved Regis so dearly that I almost broke down, when he died. It was -- very difficult to hold on to strength, or to sanity, in the immediate aftermath. And I buckled under the strain, not a week after we had laid him to rest: I packed my bags, I took Noctis, and we -- we made our way to the very city limits.

“Cor was there. He was waiting for us.”

Prompto makes herself draw in a deep breath. “What did he want?”

“He didn’t want anything. He offered me a choice.” Aulea holds both of her hands out. Palms up and empty. “On the one hand, I could leave, and my daughter with me, and -- he would make sure the family was, was dealt with, in his quiet and decisive manner. 

“On the other hand, I could stay: and he and his, those few who still stood with them, would watch my every move from then on, and judge me, judge the family, if he ever saw us put a toe out of line.”

“You stayed. You and Noctis.”

“Because I could not convince him to -- forget everything else, and leave with me. Leave with us. And believe me when I say, I tried everything. Every page in the book and ones that never should have been written in the first place. It was -- not a good night, not for me, not for him. I wrecked my voice, weeping and railing at him. I argued, I cajoled, I brought up all the old memories and old pains between us. All the old reproaches.”

“What?”

“As I said: I knew him. We grew up together. I cannot remember all the details now but -- I think, I think perhaps I might have had a giddy little girl’s dream of playing house with him all the days of my life.” Small smile. “Clearly that didn’t happen -- and I was a fool to think that something like that would ever happen. My family has always had distant ties to the Lucis Caelums, and Regis’s mother finally called on that heritage, and came to my aunts to ask if they would join the family. If they would stand with her to protect the family. And I chose to go with my aunts when they bent the knee; I was taught to guard Regis alongside his personal bodyguard, his shield -- that would be Clarus. Father of Iris and Gladiolus.”

“I’ve never met him.”

“He is in poor health, these days. We continue to hope for a full recovery.” Twitch, twitch, in the corner of Aulea’s eye. “In moving here to Insomnia, I lost my link to Cor -- and I was firmly convinced I would never meet him again. I didn’t think it possible that he’d make his way here, when here was already dying, when here was already turning into its own hell. And in any case I had heard that he had moved to some other city, someplace quieter and more lawful than this. So imagine my surprise when he appeared: and, doubling that surprise, that he had become an officer commanding the police of Insomnia, what little was left of them. 

“And imagine my surprise when in that meeting, on the outskirts of the city, he gave me that choice.”

“I don’t understand.”

Aulea’s nod, this time, is slow and weary. Her hands make a weak slapping noise as she finally lowers them to the table. “Neither did I, to begin with. I was shocked that he would want me to stay on as _Donna_ \-- he never even addressed me by my name, that night. He used nothing else but that title, and that politeness of his, that he wields like a sword. 

“But during that night, during our confrontation, he told me what he believed in: that Insomnia’s only chance at redemption lay in my hands. In Noctis’s hands. We were Insomnia’s last hope. We were Insomnia’s last chance. If we fled, and then came back -- we’d find nothing, only smoke and ruins and the corpses of the people, the corpse of the city. 

“If we stayed, even if we stayed, the city might still go down in flames -- but it would have a chance at rising again.”

“I -- what -- he believed in you? He believes in the two of you? You and Noctis?”

“He did. He does. I could not turn my back on this city, that had only been to me Regis’s city. His home, his heartland. In that I was wrong, because it had become my city, too -- and Cor chose, has chosen, to make it his, as well.”

“So -- you -- ”

Hard nod, and hard eyes. “The plan is to retake the city from, from threats like Ardyn. Him first and foremost. The plan is to reclaim Insomnia, and bring it some kind of salvation. I have my ways. Cor? I believe he might have his. I am not privy to those plans of his, and I refuse to ask. I have never forgiven him for forcing that terrible choice on me, and part of me is grateful I was forced to make it, and I will take that secret to my grave.”

Prompto’s head is spinning, but her hands are steady. “And Noctis knows.”

“She knows the relevant parts. She knows my plans to the very last detail. If she remembers the confrontation, she hasn’t seen fit to say so. All I know is, she’s making her own plans. Whatever those are, I’ll hear them when she speaks, and not a moment before. I don’t plan to ask; I will wait for her to confide in me, if she should choose to do so.”

“And so: tonight,” and Prompto thinks she’s running blind, running in a choking endless night. “Tonight: am I part of your plans or of Noctis’s or of Cor’s or -- ”

Hands taking hers.

Aulea’s grip is firm and warm, and Prompto doesn’t collapse forward onto the table, although she dearly wants to. “I ask only that you keep my secret. Keep that story that I have told you to yourself. As for plans? As I said, I have mine, and Noctis has hers. 

“Your plans tonight? They are your own, and only your own. I promise you that. I will certainly applaud if you should succeed. I will certainly worry if things should go wrong, and not just because you are taking Cindy and Ignis with you. I will worry for them, and for you: but I swear to you, tonight, I am not planning to use you.

“Let me be clear: I do not intend to use you in any of my plans, unless I give you that choice beforehand. I will tell you that I intend to use you, and I will give you a free and clear choice to work for me. This -- this sortie of yours -- this is yours and yours alone. Your goals. Your motivations. It’s yours. Just yours.”

“I -- you trust me with this?”

“Not with Noctis’s life. Not with mine. I trust Cindy and Ignis to work with you and to do their best to see you through. I trust that you want to accomplish something, in doing what you want to do tonight. I trust that what you will do will certainly harm those who wish to oppose me. I trust that what you will do will help you on your journey, whatever you want it to be. Make of that what you will, and -- and come back.” 

This time, when Aulea smiles, Prompto almost smiles back. 

“Go with my best wishes, Prompto,” Aulea says, quietly. “Go with luck. Gods and Astrals willing, I will see you again, safe and hale. Or, the gods favor you and bring you back here, even if your companions must carry you hence. And if you should meet with success along the way – then I offer to hide your precious trinket for you, until such time as you might want to present it to Noctis.”

She does let the tears out, then, as well as the laughter: her disbelief and a curious detached sort of amusement. “Does everyone _except_ Noctis know?”

Inscrutable smile, in response -- the thin inscrutable smile of a _Donna_. 

A pair of rough hands braced and bracketed in golden ornaments, in golden chains: the metal is bright and shining, and it carries the weight of her story -- and all of it, all the truths of this night, extended to her willingly and freely. To her, a vagabond, a stranger, an interloper. 

The smile is not quite like the smile she’s seen Noctis wear, when she’s had the privilege to be present for the late-night discussions with Iris and Cindy and Ignis.

Aulea smiles in a worn way, in a weary way, and it’s -- it’s quite some trick, Prompto thinks as she reaches out and takes those steady and gnarled hands in her own. A real trick and a half, for the smile doesn’t even try to hide the vicious weight of her knowledge, the grace and the guile of her.

But Prompto thinks she might learn to trust that smile anyway.

Thinks she might want to come back alive, if only to see it again.


	6. Chapter 6

“Eastern corner,” and there’s a sweet whisper in Prompto’s ear, low and urgent and compelling. “Give it a moment, he’s about to turn the corner -- go.”

And she shakes her hands a little to the right and the SMG in her hands chatters quietly and crisply and the sentry falls down, dead before he knew it, she hopes, dead before he even hit the pavement, and she rushes forward and the roar of the rain cushions her boot-steps, cushions her adrenaline-charged run, and she rifles the sentry’s jacket with quick and practiced movements. Here is a key-card, and that’s not what she’s looking for, that’s not what she’s hoping for --

“Behind you.” The quiet voice that isn’t coming from the earpiece that she’s wearing. The quiet voice that carries over the cry of the storm, and the shadow that she can trust, watching over her. 

She reaches into the inner pocket of the sentry’s jacket and her gloved fingers close around a small shape. Blocky, edges still sharp, and she shakes her head and gets back to her feet. 

She motions Ignis back to cover. The main door to the building they’re attacking tonight is now no more than twenty feet away, and not for the first time, Prompto blesses and curses the rain in equal measure: no one will want to go out and go on proper patrol in this weather, and that means all their enemies will be concentrated within the building -- but she’s got plenty of ammunition, and she knows how to control a playing field that consists of twisting tight corridors.

And she has backup.

She’s never had backup before.

So she opens her hand beneath the flickering fitful glare of a bare lightbulb -- beneath the sheeting lightning that shatters the sullen night -- and mutters, for Cindy’s benefit, “This is what I was talking about.”

Cameras riding her collar on a sleek neckband, matte-finish lightweight black metal that she almost doesn’t feel at all. Ring of muted LED light, illuminating the USB drive she’d picked up from the sentry. “I don’t know what it says for the security around here. No one’s supposed to carry these things around in this place.”

“But that’s the third one you’ve picked up,” Cindy says.

“And you are hunting for more, are you not?” Ignis asks as he adjusts his own earpiece and neckband. “Just what is in those things anyway?”

“Biometric information,” she says, simply. “Digitized fingerprints and, probably, eye-scans. Some of the doors will also be voice-locked -- I’m guessing we’ll find those prints inside. The guards out here won’t need to have that information; the ones on the inside will. Just have to get through the doors.”

“Certainly there were good intentions as to the security of this place that we are raiding tonight,” Ignis says, quietly. “But they seem to, ah, have fallen short in the execution.”

“No one seems to care,” Cindy says. “I mean. Fabulous treasure and all that. We could ransom a hundred kings and queens with that, that thing we’re stealing tonight. But none of the guards seem to give a flying fuck. Is the organization that stupid?”

“Not stupid,” Prompto says, softly. “At least, the person at the top probably isn’t, no matter how many times I call him stupid. It’s not that they don’t care. It’s that they’re afraid.” She scrubs the wetness out of her eyes and tells herself it’s the rain, and not, not anything else. 

“Were I in charge,” she hears Ignis say, “I would reinforce that fear with ungodly amounts of money. That to start with, at least.”

She thinks he means every word.

“He doesn’t want to share,” she mutters.

“Worse and worse,” she hears Cindy sigh. “Absolute psychopath. Absolute lunatic. None of this makes sense, and that makes it hard to plan. I could go on, but we’ve this job to get through, right? So -- let’s get on with it. Is there a place where you can check those drives and see what they’ve got, so we can weed out what we can use and what we can’t?”

“As soon as we get in,” she says.

“Then let’s get you two there.”

She can’t hear the clack and clatter of Cindy at work, not over the rain, not over the hammering of her heartbeat in her ears.

So it’s a surprise when Cindy says, “Got it,” and directs her to finish the loop of the path that they’ve been taking to work their way toward one of the smaller side-entrances. “Go around the next corner, hit the door beneath the streetlight.”

“That’s not exactly quiet,” Ignis warns.

“All the other entrances are right next to security outposts, so I’m not chancing those. This way you’ve got time to get ready before anyone comes for you. This way you’ve got breathing room.”

“All right,” Prompto says.

The rain reaches icy fingers down the back of her neck: and she wants to scrub at her hair, at the itch in her scalp. She’s dressed for an assault, as Ignis is -- everything in black, from ski caps to gloves to boots, and the jackets cut far too big for him and for her, so they can fit over the armor they’re both wearing. Safety glasses for both of them: his are larger and go over his spectacles; hers are finished with dark-tinted lenses.

She pulls her jacket’s hood up over her head again, and she grits her teeth and clenches her hands around the SMG and follows Ignis’s stealthy lead, and Cindy’s whispered directions.

She opens the door using the information in the sentry’s USB drive, and then she spots the workstation just around the corner -- 

“I’ll go first,” Ignis whispers.

She doesn’t cry out when his tense stride suddenly turns into a leap forward, wicked flash of the knives that he draws and flips into backhand positions and he’s cutting through a wave of attackers, shocked eyes, hands reaching for radios and she switches over to her pistol, and permits herself a grin: she shoots out the little black boxes, and then she aims for right between the eyes, and between her bullets and his blades this small corner of the building quickly falls silent.

“Good work,” Ignis says.

“Just getting started,” she replies, though she doesn’t feel like she can smile. Too many things to worry about. She sorts through the USB drives that she takes from the bodies, considers consolidating all the information in one of the little blocks of plastic and electronics, and in the end she just sweeps the whole verified lot back into her pocket and keys her own radio back on. “Cindy. You still reading us?”

“Loud and clear. No shielding for the next couple of floors, either. But better be ready to deal with the whole place. Consider getting a bigger piece?”

“Yeah,” Prompto mutters.

“Allow me,” Ignis says, and she gives him her SMG, which he slots into the harness that she’s wearing, straps around her torso and a pad with webbing and fasteners on her back.

“Something with a lot of stopping power,” Cindy suggests. 

“Translation, get a sniper rifle,” she hears Ignis say.

“Hey it works,” is Cindy’s retort.

“I don’t think they’re carrying anything like that,” Prompto begins, and then she sees it: she kicks the guard’s body clear of the heap and unbuckles the belt first. Counts the rounds, finds the extra magazine.

The gun is no more than two feet from end to end and she keeps the whole thing pointed carefully away from herself and from Ignis as she unloads it, inspects it, recounts the rounds to include the ones she’d unloaded. “Looks good to me. And once we find an armory -- we will, it’s just a matter of time -- then we can look for better ammunition. Something with more stopping power.”

“Looks like something you might use to hunt big game with,” Cindy says.

“It looks like it was made for you,” Ignis says.

It doesn’t seem to matter that she’s never used this kind of gun before: the rifle’s been cut down enough that she almost thinks of it as a pistol, if rifles were spindled and mutilated to be no more than two feet long, and still capable of stopping almost anything in its tracks.

She’s badly, badly tempted to twirl the whole thing around on her pointer finger, and maybe she will, later. Not now. Not when the weight of the thing is so new she’s more likely to break her hand, if she drops it or mishandles it somehow.

“I’ll take it,” she says.

“Good, then let’s get a move on,” and she returns the thumbs-up gesture that Ignis flashes at her.

This time she leads the way for him: for she’s never been in this place before, but something about the claustrophobic twisting corridors is familiar. Maybe the rooms they pass aren’t carpeted and brocaded, maybe there aren’t any beds in those rooms, or fake-warm lamplight: but she knows these places, knows where the dead-ends and the switchbacks are, and she peers around corners and softly debates directions with Cindy, even as they stop in a room full of open shelves and guns laid out any old how, no organization whatsoever, and she hears Ignis mutter disapproving curses as he checks over a fresh pair of SMGs.

Three times the oppressive silence explodes into a firefight: she watches Ignis’s back, and he watches hers, and Cindy calls out targets, and -- 

The fourth time, the guards are not armed.

So she grits her teeth and resorts to the cut-down rifle, sniping at them with cold precision: as cold as Ignis, when he throws one of his knives right into one more stray guard’s face.

“Getting warmer,” Cindy mutters in her ear.

“I’m guessing the lack of weapons has to do with -- keeping the treasure here, where it’s supposed to be kept,” she hears Ignis say, as he retrieves his weapon, as he picks up a fresh magazine. “Were these guards armed, they’d -- possibly try to run with the precious thing in tow. Shoot through everyone else and make a break for it. So they don’t actually get anything to defend themselves with. There is a sick kind of logic in it.”

“Forget logic. It’s murder, plain and simple,” Prompto says. “I knew we were going to do something like this.”

“We did, too,” is Cindy’s reply. “We’re used to it.”

“And so am I.”

“How close are we?” Ignis asks, after they clear one more floor.

“It’s right below you,” she hears Cindy say.

“Sitrep.”

Again the click and clatter of Cindy, working. “I count at least two dozen guards between you and your objective. And we’re still assuming the whole building’s wired to mobilize when the alarms surrounding your objective go off. So -- call it twice that, four dozen at least, and more if we’re really unlucky.”

“Double back to the armory, the second one we passed. The small one,” Prompto says. “Get ammo. Get a bag of ammo. Then we’ll do the next level.”

“Do you want music to go with that?”

Soft groan of laughter, in response, completely out of place: she levels a half-hearted glare at Ignis, since there’s no way for her to do the same for Cindy.

“You and Iris,” she hears Cindy say, mock-admonishing. “And therefore, Noctis. Don’t you start with that track again -- at least find yourself some taste.”

“Taste is a relative thing, as I always remind you,” is Ignis’s answer, and then he whistles quietly, and it’s a compelling riff, one that ends with him muttering in a language Prompto doesn’t understand -- 

“Ugh,” and then there’s actual music in Prompto’s ears, something that almost makes her want to dance, driving electronic beats in a medley of rising choral voices -- 

“Well, that one’s all right,” she hears Ignis say.

She blanks them out in favor of hustling to the small cramped room full of guns, in favor of counting bullets. 

She desperately wants to scratch at her sweaty skin, but the snug fit of the ballistic vest won’t let her, and she growls and shakes out her shoulders and her arms, and picks her guns back up, and Ignis follows her as she silently retraces her steps, all the way to the door where they’d had the sitrep conversation -- 

“Ready?” she hears him ask.

They lose reception halfway down the staircase: one moment Cindy is muttering about security measures, and the next, her voice drops out into a blank hiss. 

Ignis raises a warning fist to her and she taps her neckband, prays for signal reacquisition -- 

“Guys,” is the last word they hear from Cindy.

“We were lucky enough to have gotten her in that far,” Ignis mutters. “Now we’re really on our own.”

“I don’t plan to stop now,” she says, and hears the edges in her own voice, like sharp swords.

“I don’t expect you to.” How he finds the time to smile at her -- a real smile, small and kind and encouraging -- nothing like disdain in him, nothing like condescension -- she can’t understand.

So she just pats his shoulder and gets back to the walking: and her boots clang softly against the metal of the staircase.

The door to the next floor requires three separate voice-prints to unlock, and she’s not sure she’s not imagining the sigh of relief that escapes Ignis.

She doesn’t imagine the huge shadow that appears down the corridor, either: blank eyes, and she hefts the cut-down rifle and fires four shots -- two into each eye -- and Ignis finishes that hulking sentry with a precise burst into the throat, all but decapitating it.

Skid around that dead body only to find another like it, monstrous and alive, and roaring now as it charges them -- it’s fast, it’s hideously fast, and she doesn’t scream her shock or her fear: only instructions. “Go high, Ignis, I’ll go low!”

“Got it!”

Blood in gushing rivers as they take out another one, and then another -- and, unimaginably, there’s cover for them to crouch behind: three workstations cobbled together, and she reaches out to the keyboards with bloodstained hands. Calls up the maps of the floor and -- why is she not surprised? 

Two locked vaults. Two possibilities. 

“Trap,” she hears Ignis say.

“Trap,” she agrees. “We’re not hitting those.”

“What do you suggest?”

“I’m going to pull the alarms.”

She can see him blanch, even in the sparse light of the glowing monitors. “I expect you have a good reason for doing so.”

She nods, once. “I’ve seen those before,” and she hooks her thumb over her shoulder, in the direction of dead bodies. “Well. I didn’t know that those big ones existed, not exactly. But those eyes, you noticed their eyes? All the color drained away. Those I know. They’re, well, they’re my worst nightmares: as big as the guards on my room, as drugged-up as my friend Loqi. Like him -- they’ve had nothing but the red stuff, I still don’t know what it’s called even now, and I’m not talking about it here.”

“They didn’t truly seem human, not to me,” she hears him mutter.

She hears the undertones of fear in his voice, too, and she reaches out and squeezes his shoulder. “If you’re scared of them, good, fucking join the club.”

“I can see why you fear them.”

“Not them,” and she taps her temple. “Not scared of them, per se. I’m scared of the drug. I’m scared of what it does. And you can see what it’s done to them: they’re nothing more than just mountains of flesh and muscle, no more brains to speak of. Only enough left to understand one set of orders, maybe two if we’re lucky. And those orders will be: kill anything that tries to come in.”

“The second one?”

“Guard something.”

She watches the muscles tic along his jawline. “You expect them to jump us here, because we’re trying to get to what they’re guarding.”

She nods. “They’ll be here, looking for us: and they’ll also gather at the entrance to the actual storage room.” 

“I have grave misgivings. Not about you or your plan. About this place, and the ones who own it. The ones who placed these, these beings here to guard it.”

“Oh. Well. Yeah,” she says, and she looks around on the nearest console. 

Hits the button marked _Emergency Lockdown_.

Wail of alarms and scream of stressed electronics -- the hardware all around catches fire, and she hears Ignis swear, brief and vile, as he dives out of cover and comes up firing, knee-capping the behemoth lumbering towards him and she gets to her feet and goes for the next target -- 

Scream of those inhuman voices as they die, one after the other -- 

“Reloading,” Ignis mutters and she wishes for something else, anything else, something even bigger than what they’re already using. What she’d give, she thinks, for a rocket launcher, for a grenade or two -- all they’ve got are all their bullets, and she’s still trying to make each one count, and then Ignis is hitting her boot with his fist and it’s her turn to check her ammo, her turn to slap in a fresh magazine before she gets back into the fight --

Stink of gunpowder on her hands and the smell of blood and whatever else is circulating inside those over-sized misshapen bodies, inside those barely-living beings -- she chokes and coughs and grits her teeth against the rising urge to vomit, the screams she swallows with difficulty -- 

How much time passes? How long do the alarms wail for? Crash and rumble as one more enemy goes down, and she fights to stay upright, to keep on her toes, waiting breathless and fearful for the next attack, the next attacker. 

But no one approaches, nothing is moving their way, and she exchanges a glance with Ignis. 

“Might be time to move,” he says.

“Straight into the next ones,” she mutters, and she takes point again, every step haunted by the memory of colorless eyes, nearly-transparent gray surrounding pupils gone dilated with scarlet rage -- 

There. Shadows moving away from her.

Ignis wordlessly places himself between her and their enemies, and she forces herself to unclench, forces herself to release the tension barbed and hooked into her shoulders, so she won’t miss -- she’s still carrying the weight of too much ammunition, but there’s no way of knowing how many they still have left to kill --

“Loqi,” she mutters, only once, only underneath her breath.

And she loses herself in the clatter and cry and the harsh-stinking smoke of the fight, right up until Ignis points to the door, and the path he’s cleared for her toward that door.

Slip-slide of a run, the floor awash with brownish-red, and she slides the last few feet and nearly knocks herself unconscious on the actual door, or on its cracked jamb -- she kicks the door open and screams, “Come on!”

“That’s not much,” he shouts back -- but she holds the door open so he can dive behind its flimsy sham of cover and he dispatches two more sentries on the way.

And then she hears him say, “Clear for now.”

“I’m going for it,” she says, and she pushes into the next room, alone. The last USB drive she’d picked up lets her in, one last set of voice-prints and iris-scans.

Lurid green lighting outlining the ceiling, and the very floor beneath her feet looks like the garish patterns Ardyn had favored, and she nearly, nearly freezes in place.

Nearly expects to see him loom from behind the plain pedestal in the center of the room. Bright white light shining upwards, allowing her to see the wooden box on that pedestal. Dark wood and darker grain, polished to a high shine.

She uses the cut-down rifle to prod at the pedestal, and she expects more alarms -- she’s half-expecting to get trapped in the room, locked in with all her fears.

Nothing happens, except that Ignis appears in the doorway, disheveled and concerned. “All right?”

“No,” she mumbles, and she pokes the wooden box with her hand, this time.

The box only moves a little in response.

Now or never.

She lifts the box from its pedestal. Feels around for the hinges, which will help her find the latch, and: _click_.

The lid of the box swings open without her having to touch anything else.

From over her shoulder she hears a sharp intake of breath.

She suddenly doesn’t know what she’s looking at, except: she’s seen these blues before, living and full of light, several different shades of blue in one pair of eyes.

Each of the pearls in the long, long strand coiled in the box is bigger than the knuckle of her middle finger.

And every single one of the pearls is matched to its neighbor, creating a gorgeous gradation of color, of blue, from one end of the strand to the other.

“Worth it,” she hears Ignis say. “More than worth it. All that we went through.”

She shakes her head, still choking on her disbelief. “We still have to get out of here.”

“I know. We could still fail at any moment. But now that I have seen that: I completely understand why you wanted to take the risk. This entire mountain of a risk.”

She dares to look at him, then: and the look on his face is composed of fear and reverence and wonder. 

“I’ve seen some jewels, but -- truly, I’ve never seen anything like that before.”

“Noctis,” she says.

“I think -- I think she’ll appreciate these, once you present them to her. She’ll -- shout at you, yes. She’ll be angry we did this without her. But, but I’d like to think she’ll maybe understand what this means. And maybe she’ll understand you a little better.”

“She’ll know that I take too many risks,” Prompto mutters.

“Yes. But if those risks are worth the cost, worth the price, then you mustn’t stop taking them.”

Finally she makes herself look away from those pearls, all of them matched and all of them flawless, cushioned in creamy white cloth. Closes the box and slides it into the flat pack that’s been slung at her left hip all this time, and she looks at her shaking hands, and risks picking up her guns once again. 

“Ready to leave?”

“I was ready as soon as I came in,” she says, and she plunges out the door after him.

Cindy’s voice kicking back in as she runs pell-mell down corpse-littered corridors, Ignis hurtling after her: “ -- respond! As soon as you get this, respond! Ignis! Prompto! Talk to me!”

“Here,” she hears him say, as they gun down a stray patrol -- again she sees those shocked faces, caught off-guard, and she can’t think of them as innocents -- she isn’t, they aren’t, they’re all complicit -- she can’t allow herself to feel any pity for them, any sympathy for them.

It’s easier, somehow, when she thinks of Loqi: then she can fire and fire, cold-blooded, cold clear vision, cold hands despite the hot sweat trickling down the back of her neck.

“Not that I didn’t know that was going to happen,” Cindy’s saying, now, “not that I wasn’t expecting to get cut off but -- fuck, are you okay?”

“We’re good,” she says, softly. “Just get us out of here and we might even survive the night.”

“Good, I’ve got just the thing,” and somehow, just like that, Cindy is rapping out directions: and they’re clear of the building and running back to the small van parked two blocks away, and her ears are ringing even as she’s checking the doors -- hands gloved in black and yellow, hauling her in, and she clings, blindly, over the gearshift, to golden warmth.

“Hush, hush, you’re fine, I’m real,” Cindy is whispering into her ear. Cindy is holding her, is steadying her. “We’re real. You’re with us. We’re your friends. It’s me, it’s Cindy.”

Arms winding from behind her, and Ignis’s voice against the back of her head, saying his name softly, for her benefit: “It’s me, it’s Ignis.”

It helps. It’s almost enough to make her forget the shakes, make her forget the horrors of the night, the blood they’ve spilled and the dead bodies -- and the fear of Ardyn, walking after her, stalking her all the way back to the Citadel district.

Still, she’s grateful when Ignis leads her and all her guns and her precious souvenir into one of the back seats of the van -- small cramped space, hemmed in by radios and surveillance gear, Cindy’s eyes and ears on the world -- and he says, “Don’t even think about trying to get the vest off yourself.”

“I don’t have the strength to do anything,” she says, frankly, shamefully.

“And that is just how it should be. I’m not driving us home, either. Rest a little. We’ll sneak into my quarters once we get back.”

“No need to sneak.” 

She looks up when Cindy turns to smile at her, while they’re idling at a traffic light. “Noctis has been in the Stormland area all day long, and she’s not expected back for maybe another hour.”

“I want to see her,” and Prompto covers her mouth after she says it, and nearly gags on the myriad stinks layered into her gloves.

“I’m sure you do. But let’s not spoil the surprise.”

And she’s grateful she can lean on the two of them as they all walk arm-in-arm through the Citadel and its quiet winding ways, grateful that they’re not letting her spill over into a puddle of exhaustion and, paradoxically, the buzz in her nerves that tells her she’s done something -- maybe something she’ll eventually regret, but right now she wants that buzz to stay and she wants to laugh -- so she does, and Cindy is grinning at Ignis as the elevator doors open, and -- 

“Do I want to know?”

Prompto blinks, and looks over her shoulder.

But it’s Ignis who speaks first: “Noctis,” she hears him say. “I was told you wouldn’t be returning until late.”

“Oh that. Nothing to worry about. Finished everything ahead of schedule. So Libertus told someone off to escort me and Iris back. Would’ve been Gladio, but I just got off the phone with him. He’s staying with his dad tonight -- and I told Iris to go see them, too.” Elegant lift of an eyebrow. 

Prompto slowly takes in the details of her: almost-sheer black shift, long sleeves. Silver beads forming the shapes of five-pointed stars scattered here and there. Marbled silver and gray and pink outlines in the bell-sleeved jacket, hems outlined in deep green. Bare feet on the carpets.

“Looks like you’ve been up to -- interesting things,” Noctis goes on, folding her arms over her chest.

Cindy coughs, quietly, and that brings Prompto back to her senses. 

That makes Prompto say, “Interesting, that’s a good word for it.”

And that’s when she slips out of the others’ arms, and she sits down hard on the carpet, and her cheeks go hot with embarrassment and she wishes she could turn into dust and blow away -- 

“Prompto.”

Her name.

Noctis is calling her name.

And Noctis is grasping her wrists, strong rough grip, and she’s rising to her feet, but not because she’s making herself stand up. She’s rising to her feet because Noctis is pulling her up, because Noctis is pulling her close, and she’s smiling -- somehow smiling and Prompto tries to smile back.

But what she says is, “I think I did something entirely foolish.”

“We support foolishness in this family,” is the gentle answer. “Well. From a certain point of view it’s foolishness. But maybe it’s also -- being brave. Being willing to risk things.”

Prompto nods, and she’s expecting to get batted away, when she wraps her arms around Noctis’s waist.

She doesn’t expect the next words out of Noctis’s mouth, not at all: “Can I kiss you?”

“Okay, okay, we know when we’re not wanted,” Cindy laughs, and Prompto looks over her shoulder, and raises a half-wave at her and at Ignis, who merely taps his finger twice against his own mouth before following Cindy.

“That -- that’s a risk, right,” Prompto says, trying to keep up with Noctis’s thoughts. “You asking me.”

“Yup.” And Noctis waggles her eyebrows in an absolutely ridiculous fashion. “What do you think, is it a risk you want to take?”

Prompto smiles back, and leans in, and presses her lips to Noctis’s.

Who sighs and catches her up by the shoulders and tries to pull her even closer -- 

And Prompto doesn’t want to step away, but she does, and she spreads her hands, sheepishly. “You can’t tell me it’s fun, kissing me, when I stink.”

“I don’t know why you smell of blood,” Noctis says, looking a little concerned, and a lot confused. “And guns. Lots and lots of guns. What did you _do_?”

“I’ll tell you later. So -- so maybe come to the rooms, my rooms, in half an hour? I might be able to explain some of it. Not all of it. Some.”

“You realize you didn’t really clear anything up.”

She looks away. “Sorry.”

Fingertips on her cheeks, making her turn back. “No, I didn’t mean to say something to hurt you. I just, you’re acting all mysterious.” As she watches, Noctis smiles, and shakes her head -- and steps away. “Well, lucky for you I like that, when you’re being mysterious. So. You said. Your rooms in half an hour. I’ll be there.”

Prompto nods, and wants to kiss her again, and settles for saying, “See you.”

Once in her room she leaves the flat pack and the ballistic vest and the bloodstained black clothes in little heaps. Cold shower, sluicing away the night’s exertions, the night’s smells of petrichor and rust and cordite; and she sits on the bed, and pulls on the first things she finds in her closet -- a pair of black briefs and a pale-green shirt with gray pinstripes -- and there’s a knock on the door, a series of quiet knocks, when she goes to retrieve the flat pack.


	7. noctis interlude, one

It’s not the same, watching Prompto walk away from her: it’s not the same, and it can’t be the same, and she doesn’t feel that compulsion that hammers now at the very soles of her feet, the sting and the prickle of urgency in her own skin, when she’s watching the others go.

The others: her companions. 

Maybe she’s felt something like this, with her other lovers: but what’s the point of comparing? She still remembers being giddy and being punch-drunk around Aranea, around Sania. She still remembers walking around in a dreamy reverie, in the wake of Ravus. 

And the hot and cold spasms racing through her hands right now are completely new, and completely different -- hot and cold, sawing down her nerve endings -- and all because of Prompto. Because of the kiss, and because she’s standing here, and Prompto has asked her to wait half an hour.

She’s almost alone in the corridor for another heartbeat, another breath -- and in the end she looks over her shoulder, knowing who’s walking towards her, before she can even appear around the corner. Crowe is a constant presence in the Citadel, with Aulea’s near-seclusion: but she’s not at all overbearing, pale and tired though she might be -- and her suit is showing the stress of all those vigilant hours, where her collar has completely wilted and her sleeves are stained with too much dust and too much sweat.

“Tell me where my mother is,” Noctis says, softly, “and then go away. If you don’t sleep, you and yours won’t be able to protect her.”

“Sleep. Yeah. I’ve almost forgotten what that is,” she hears Crowe mutter in response. “Your mother’s in the night-garden. Can you find your way there by yourself?”

“Of course I can.” And she does Crowe the kindness of saying nothing else in response; she just flicks her fingers against stooped shoulders. “Get some rest.”

“Night.”

“Yeah, what.”

Noctis smiles when Crowe somehow musters the energy to roll her eyes -- the joke was already threadbare the week after Gladio’d come up with it -- and then she’s ruthlessly squashing down the urge to look over her shoulder, to head in another direction entirely. To let her nose lead her down the paths that reek of blood and gunpowder and fear-sweat, because she still has to wait half an hour. At least that.

Prompto had asked her to follow in half an hour, and that’s how it’s going to be.

And the thought of ignoring that request rises again in Noctis’s mind, even as she threads the steps up and up and away, in the opposite direction. As she heads up into the loftiest heights of the Citadel, into those shadowed nooks of crumbling arch and creeping vine, into the grotto of white and purple and yellow flowers.

Scents mixing thickly-sweet on the back of her tongue, when she inhales: she almost forgets about the glossy leaves clinging to the walls, almost forgets about the burrs in the lush grass beneath her feet. 

Careful steps around one mound of broken rock and powdery-fragile brick, the wind and the night’s rains having added one more round of insult and erosion to their injuries, and she rounds the last bend in the path: candle-flicker and the rustle of shawl and coat, the faint ring of golden ornaments.

“Did you go on a date and no one bothered to tell me?” Noctis asks, as she sits on the end of the bench.

“And who would be mad enough to take me out on a date? No, don’t answer that question,” and Aulea is sort of making a face at her, like a fleeting pout.

Noctis laughs. “You’re mad, I’m mad, we’re all mad here.”

“As I’m only too aware, Noctis.”

Out of the corner of her eye, she watches as Aulea takes off the ornate collar-and-yoke worked in gold filigree, and sets it aside -- and the whole thing only looks light and airy. 

She knows this because there’s a near-copy of the piece in her own rooms, and she’s made an agreement with her mother, concerning them. 

“We make our own happiness, gods above know we’ve scraped by and tried to do that for so long,” had been Aulea’s words on that long-ago night. “But I will be happy in my own ways, and you will be happy in yours, and I would be an absolute fool to expect that those ways, and those blessed days, will ever coincide. I ask only that you wear your finery from time to time, so others can see that you are happy; and in return I will not wear mine when you are wearing yours. And we will allow the reverse to hold true. Whatever you do with it, I only hope that you will treat it with respect, as it was still a present from your grandmother.”

“Fair enough,” Noctis had said, then.

In the here and now, Noctis brushes a fingertip over the pulse in her own throat, and wonders that she’s a little calmer. That her thoughts have cooled down somewhat. Is it the garden? Is it the night-winds and the rare glimpse of stars in the storm-cleared sky? Is it her mother?

“This isn’t a place you visit,” her mother says, quietly.

“This is where you think,” she says, and she takes the hand that is extended toward her, and she holds it in both of her own. “I get distracted here.”

“I can guess why.”

“Moonflowers doing well, then?” She gestures at the nearest pillar, cracks spiderwebbing the stone and in those cracks the long needle-like leaves, the unfurling white flowers like faces peering delicate and careful out of the night.

“Better than I could have ever hoped for. I’d thought they were done for, after that cold snap that we had. But look, they’re flourishing. I’ve been taking pictures for the past few nights, so Clarus can enjoy the sight of them.” Brief pause. “But you didn’t come here to talk about -- growing things.”

Noctis shrugs, one-shouldered. “I did come here to see you. I don’t like it when I don’t get the chance to see you. Even if it’s just the two of us passing each other in the corridors -- you know I’d feel better if I saw you.”

“And I feel better, for seeing you now,” her mother murmurs. “But again. Not here for the flowers, are you.”

“Yeah. I’m not.” Noctis pulls away, gets to her feet, paces, a little. “So don’t bother hiding anything from me, because you stopped doing that years ago and it’s too late and stupid for you to start again now. Anyway, not a thing happens in this place without you knowing of it before or during, and you talked to somebody before tonight. Or was it last night? Irrelevant. What I came here to ask is this: 

“What in the name of all the gods we raise our middle fingers to did you think you were doing, letting Prompto go out with Cindy and Ignis? Did they even tell you what they were up to? And what did they want Prompto for?”

Only the wind answers her at first -- and then she hears her mother say, “I’m afraid you’ve got it the wrong way around. It was Prompto who asked the other two to go with her. She had -- a task -- that she’d set for herself, and she chose to ask them for help. I didn’t think they needed much convincing, truth be told.”

“What do you mean, a task for herself?”

Blink. Blink. 

Her mother is patting the bench again. “Come. Sit.”

She settles, gingerly, and holds her mother’s hand again.

“I know what she wanted to do, but not how she was planning to go about it. I don’t even know what she truly wants to accomplish. I only needed to know if she was planning to do anything that would end up harming us -- but as she wanted to hurt the Izunias, as she wanted to attack Ardyn himself -- what else could I do? I wished her luck, and let her go on her way.”

Noctis’s blood runs cold in her veins. “Attack. Like, not like a full-frontal assault? That’s not happening tonight, or we wouldn’t even be having this conversation. We’d be riding out by now.”

“We’d be having this conversation in the middle of the guns,” and her mother is correcting her, gently. “So no. It was not that kind of attack. Maybe you’ll get more answers out of the others, if you ask them the right questions.”

She almost laughs. “Right, mother. And you know damn well they taught me how to keep secrets. It works because they are very, very good with that code of honor shit, and I’m good because of them, and now they’re keeping a secret from me. I’d never be able to pry that secret from them, never in a million years.”

“That leaves you with no recourse, I’m afraid, but to speak to -- the instigator herself.”

“Instigator. When you say it that way, it sounds -- strange. But good.” She nods, and glances at her bare wrist: she’s left the watch she’d been wearing all day long in her quarters. “I talked to her when they got in and, and she asked me to come see her in half an hour. Do you have the time?”

A smile, and a mild shake of the head. “You know there’s no place for timepieces here.”

She’s torn, for a moment: she wants to shake the answers out of Prompto, and she wants to -- to cling to her mother’s side.

Her mother’s arm is a welcome warm weight, then, looping gently around her shoulders and pulling her closer.

She turns her face into her mother’s sleeve, and takes a deep breath, and another.

And she gives voice to the thought that’s been bothering her: “Boundaries,” she says, a little muffled. 

“Yes,” is the quiet response. “What about them?”

“How did you know where yours were? How did you establish them? With, with everyone else. Dad and, and Clarus. Cor,” she whispers. 

“You have left out one name from your list: yours.”

She blinks, and looks up, and laughs a little. “We have boundaries?”

But she gets the briefest glimpse of a frown, in response, and she wishes she could take the joke back. 

“If we didn’t have any boundaries, dear, I really think that we might have killed each other already.”

She doesn’t even have to think about it. “Okay. Yes. True that.”

“And it never was an easy process for me to set boundaries for myself, and to respect others’ boundaries,” Aulea goes on. 

Noctis nods some more. “Right, the whole facade thing.”

“Yes. And that is a necessary skill to know, and to have, but so are boundaries.”

“So how -- ”

“I only know one way that can produce results, and not even guaranteed ones,” she hears her mother say.

“Talking,” she guesses.

Brief sharp nod. “Almost there. Conversation. The proper give-and-take of speaking and listening -- and understanding. I know that all three of those things can be difficult. I know all too well that people _are_ difficult. And I know to my own sorrow that not even conversation can yield consistent results all the time. Sometimes it will work, and sometimes it will not, depending on the person or the persons you are speaking with.”

“And sometimes you can’t even get the same results with the same person,” Noctis says, though she thinks fondly of the others as she says it.

Quiet rueful laugh. “Yes. But there isn’t any other way, is there? Short of reading minds, and I’ve often been accused of that. Except that I can’t actually do it.”

It’s Noctis’s turn to laugh, and she leans into her mother’s embrace to do it. “I don’t know how to do that, either.”

“So we will all just have to muddle along.”

“Oh boy,” Noctis says, and she presses a kiss to her mother’s cheek. “That sounds like you’re telling me to run along and have a conversation with someone else.”

“Your words, not mine.” Aulea laughs, and kisses her forehead in return, and the sound and the touch send warmth into her heart. “But you do know that I am cheering you on, don’t you?”

“Just as I know you’ll be there for me if I fuck it all up beyond repair,” Noctis says with a sharp laugh of her own. “You’ll let me break into your super-protected cellar and, and drink myself into oblivion.”

“When I see the way you look at each other, I feel that things cannot possibly end in heartbreak.”

She shakes her head, a little. “You must be reading my mind. I was thinking, earlier, of Aranea. Of Sania. Those things did not end well. Or do I have to remind you?”

It’s a paltry satisfaction, seeing Aulea wince. “Noctis.”

“Still have the scars from them, you know, good thing the tats cover them up,” and with that Noctis draws her jacket back around herself, and heads back into the corridors of the Citadel.

She gives in to the impulse to take Prompto something from the night-garden: a single long stem bearing a large cup-shaped bloom, and four overlapping petals. Apricot-blush heart deep in the center of the flower, and a faint spicy-smoky scent that clings to her hands.

By the time she’s stepping out of the elevator that brings her to the floor on which Prompto’s room is located, the outer edges of the petals are already starting to acquire a hairline-edge of vivid red.

Noctis takes a deep breath of the flower’s fragrance and knocks, softly, on the door.

No answer.

This is the Citadel: this is her mother’s fortress, and this is her family’s headquarters, and all the rooms ought to swing open to her, and all the occupants of those rooms ought to bow their heads before her, except -- that’s not really how it works, Noctis thinks, as she shuffles her feet uncertainly on this particular threshold. 

Certainly Iris had cured her of the habit of barging in at all hours, unannounced: and sometimes those arguments had even ended in the sparring ring, and left Noctis bruised for days afterwards. 

Cindy prefers to settle issues through the fine and dishonorable art of talking back; Noctis now enjoys it when she’s beating everyone else down at the negotiating table.

Ignis? He goes cold, Noctis thinks. Cold and hard and silent, and not just to her but to nearly everyone else surrounding him.

For some reason, she’s not exactly eager to cross Prompto’s boundaries: she doesn’t want to find out what Prompto will or won’t do, if she feels threatened. She doesn’t even want to start speculating; and maybe it has something to do with being too-painfully privy to some of her traumas, and to many of her nightmares.

And so Noctis knocks again, and waits, though she has nowhere near the legendary patience of her mother.

“Come in.”

Finally she pushes in through the door that separates her from Prompto, and -- there’s a flat box of some kind on the pillows.

Noctis dismisses the box from her mind and turns to the tension in Prompto’s hands, fists opening and closing, spasming against the tails of her button-down shirt.

“Are you all right?”

Noctis blinks, and stares: because she’d been about to ask that very question, and yet Prompto’s smiling at her, reaching out to her. 

She crosses the room and sits near the foot of the bed -- and Prompto’s scooting closer, tucking her feet beneath her, compact shape of her, so near.

“I was going to ask you if you were okay,” Noctis says. “And I am. I’m all right. I did go out and talk to people, but I didn’t spend the day getting shot at.”

“Oh that.” The corner of Prompto’s mouth quirks up for only a moment. “It was a risk that I needed to take. And -- and Ignis and Cindy went along to make sure I didn’t get my idiot ass killed.”

“As long as you’re here, as long as you’re all right, then -- then we’ll just keep on going.” And finally, belatedly, Noctis offers her the flower. “Here.”

“It’s pretty,” Prompto says, and she tips her head forward. Her shoulders move as she takes a deep breath of the flower’s scent. “Smells really good too. What is it?”

“We grow it here,” Noctis says. “Mother can tell you what it’s called, if you make it up to the night-garden. If she has a few minutes she’ll usually be dealing with the weeds. Watering the more delicate plants.”

“I never would have imagined your mom to keep a garden.”

“So imagine my surprise when she decided she’d take over after Clarus’s accident. The garden was, is, still the place where he did a lot of his thinking.”

“Maybe I’ll tell Iris to send my best on to him,” she hears Prompto say. “Or Gladio.”

“That’s really kind of you,” Noctis murmurs.

“Better to be kind. I can’t go up to the garden anyway, and I can’t go and see Iris’s dad. I -- sure, Noctis, you and your mom let me run around this place, but, but you can’t really be letting me into all your family secrets just yet.”

Noctis sighs, and falls backwards into the bed, into the bunched-up duvet -- and asks, suddenly, “Sorry, should I get up?”

“No, stay where you are. Please?”

And then Prompto is stretching out next to her, close enough to touch. Long moments of quiet breaths. She’s still holding the flower in one hand, and it rests on her chest, on the buttons of her shirt. “I’m tired.”

“Do I want to know why you’re tired?” Noctis asks, trying to be quiet and soothing and, and not too curious.

She is, she’s burning up with curiosity, and she tries to keep all of it out of her voice.

“Don’t want you yelling at me. They said that you would. Ignis and Cindy.”

Brush of Prompto’s free hand against her own.

In return, Noctis brushes her knuckles over Prompto’s sleeve, and pulls away again.

It’s nice, it’s a sweet kind of shock, when Prompto takes her hand, and says, “I hope you don’t mind this, I hope you don’t mind me.”

“I really don’t,” she says, truthfully. “I -- how could I mind?”

Quiet chuckle in response. “Good, because I’m not sure I can let you go.”

“Please don’t,” and Noctis wonders how far she’s already managed to let Prompto in past her own boundaries, past the walls around her heart, the walls around her mind.

Or is it even possible that she’s let Prompto all the way in, all the way through? Is that why she feels so close now? Is that why she doesn’t feel strange, holding her hand?

“You need someone to watch your back, don’t you,” she hears Prompto say, presently.

She nods. “Yes. Because I’m doing fine right now.”

“Right now,” Prompto is echoing. “Yeah. Everything’s fine and dandy but you and I both know it won’t last.”

“Last? No, never, it can’t. Nature of the beast. Nature of Insomnia.” Noctis sighs, cynically. 

And Prompto echoes her sigh. “Nature of life, right. And that means -- you know it, don’t you? You know it like I do. You and I both know things are about to go down. And it’s gonna be hellfire everywhere and, and blood running in the streets.”

“Again,” Noctis sighs. “Seems to be the story of my family at this point. And I don’t want to know how many times my mom’s been through this shit. I don’t even want to ask, because -- I look at her face and I’m scared, really, and I really, really don’t want to fucking lose her.”

“I’d do everything to keep you, and her, alive.”

“One or the other, Prompto. I mean I have faith in you, but you can’t protect us both.” Noctis squeezes the hand in hers, gently, by way of softening the words.

“If you watch your mother’s back, then -- then I can watch yours.” Soft steely determined.

Noctis blinks, and thinks about it, and sits up.

And she looks at the ironic little twist in Prompto’s smile. The edges of her. She’s been copper-haired for several weeks now, and maybe she’ll stay that way for a while, considering that her roots are completely covered again. Dark shadows under her eyes -- she’s not wearing her contacts and Noctis can see the tired red creeping in around those lovely violet-blue irises -- and the sight reminds her of the flower that she’d picked, the flower that Prompto’s still holding.

How long has it been since the anniversary of her father’s death? How long has it been since she’d held a gun to Prompto’s forehead and, and fired at the sidewalk? The nights of sitting together into the cold silent hours, when Noctis could even spare those hours. The nights of silence, the first few conversations, the whispers of terrible dreams that kept them both awake, tear-stains across Prompto’s freckles, gathering in the corners of her mouth.

The Prompto of that first night is gone, Noctis thinks, really and truly gone, as if she had been buried in a shallow grave and left behind, somewhere in the long remorseless nights.

A shallow grave that she’d asked Noctis to dig, and all the others too. 

And, rising from that grave, unquiet, and terribly still: the Prompto of here and now is -- not a warrior, and not even a member of the family per se. Tears still trailing from the corner of her eye, and a flower in her hand -- but Noctis knows she’s been out, she’s been hunting, and she doesn’t even know what Prompto’s brought back but, but she’s certainly someone else, now, someone who can hunt, someone who can come back from something as dangerous as, as attacking the same people who had nearly broken her in the first place. 

Someone Noctis might be able to trust.

Someone Noctis wants to kiss, anyway, and she leans over, so Prompto can see her properly. “Hey.”

The questions she meant to ask, the questions on the tip of her tongue: they unravel, soft and startled, when Prompto smiles up at her and tosses the flower in the direction of the flat box on the pillows, so she can reach out to touch her -- and Noctis makes a small sound, and closes her eyes, and leans into those rough fingertips.

“Fuck,” she hears Prompto say.

Her eyes fly wide wide open -- and Prompto is coming closer, closer, is kissing her, and Noctis is looking right at her as the kiss lingers, so sweet and gentle that Noctis feels her heart clench with a beautiful bright agony, vibrant and breathtaking.

“Again?” is all she can say, when Prompto falls back, defeated by gravity. “Kiss me again?”

“You want to,” she hears Prompto begin, and then she’s the one closing the distance between them, bowed over Prompto as she kisses her and this time there’s a hint of teeth, a hint of tongue, and Noctis laughs a little and chases the taste of her so she can hold on to it, so she can keep some memory of it for herself.

How long they kiss, she doesn’t know. She never wants to stop, and she curses the necessity of breaking away to breathe, but -- but there’s Prompto, smiling and drawing her back in, again and again.

At some point, though, the kisses fade away into something almost as good: and Noctis settles Prompto more firmly in the circle of her arms. Cheek to cheek now where they’ve moved so they’re sitting up on the pillows, and Noctis finally allows herself to ask: “What did you do, and why did you take Cindy and Ignis with you?”

Again that sweet laughter, again that teasing edge, but when she looks at Prompto’s face she feels like she’s trespassing: because there’s something haunted in the shadow that settles briefly above her eyebrows. 

“Don’t tell me if you can’t. If you won’t. I mean, I want to know,” Noctis begins.

“I know you want to know. I’ve been thinking, you need to yell at me anyway, leaving you worried all these weeks. You want to know what I was doing,” Prompto says. “You need to know what I was doing. I just don’t know if I have the words.”

“Okay.”

“It’s not okay.” And now Prompto is reaching for the flat box. “But first. I got this for you.”

She gives in to the urge to shake Prompto, a little. “I never expected you to give me anything. I thought I’d made that clear?”

“Maybe it didn’t stick,” is Prompto’s reply. “But whether or not you expected anything, I still, I still wanted to find something I could give you. It’s not _thank you_. It’s not, uh, it’s not even _date me_ \-- ”

And Noctis has to clamp down on the laugh that bubbles up unexpectedly in her chest, when red flares in Prompto’s cheeks. A laugh that, she thinks, would have contained the words _yes_ and _please_. 

Instead she tries to be kind: she turns that laugh into a cough and says, quietly, “What is it then? What’s in that box?”

The silence is broken only by their breathing.

Prompto turns around in her arms, suddenly, and doesn’t flinch at all, when she says, “It’s a promise. What I stole from the Izunias, because they shouldn’t have had it in the first place. Because they never deserved it. And if they don’t, then who deserves it? Maybe it’s an evil thought, Noctis. Maybe it’s me being a terrible person. But they don’t deserve it and, and they did terrible things to me. So, so I think I deserve it. And I think it’s mine. 

“That’s why I went to get it. That’s why I raided the Izunias. I wanted to get this box. This box, and what’s inside it: which is my promise to you.”

“What kind of promise,” Noctis breathes, quietly.

“That you’ve got me. That I’ll be yours, if you’ll have me. I mean, I want in, I want to be a part of your family. I want to be someone who could watch your back.”

“That’s not entirely up to me,” Noctis says, “but if it were, you would have been part of my crew the moment you asked me to kill you.”

That gets her a smile, and a nod. “Yeah. I -- I think I know that to be true. So, open that,” and she motions to the box.

“Hold it for me,” Noctis murmurs, and then she feels around for the latch: the solid loud click and a glimpse of white and -- 

Blue, is what she sees, a beautiful spectrum of blue, sparkling up at her.

She can’t think, she can’t breathe, she can’t believe -- 

It’s sacrilege, it’s profanity, to touch: and she does, she can’t help it, she looks for the end of the strand and she lifts that pearl out from its nest, from its protective shroud. Cool in her fingertips, the fine fine pitting that she can perceive in her skin, the tiny bumps in the shape that prevent it from being a perfect sphere -- it’s enough, it’s more than enough to convince her that she’s probably looking at the genuine article, at the actual treasure.

Impossible. Impossible. And yet it’s here, and she’s touching it, and -- Noctis, breathless, looks up and catches Prompto’s eye -- 

Prompto, who looks like she’s facing her own execution, wide-eyed and trembling and proud -- 

This fabulous thing. This notorious thing. 

That it’s here, that she’s holding it: this treasure is no longer just a treasure.

This treasure is more than just Prompto’s promise.

This thing is a declaration of war. 

“How,” Noctis begins, and she doesn’t know where that sentence goes -- so she says, instead, “May I?”

“It’s yours,” Prompto says, without hesitation. “I took it from Ardyn Izunia and I, I took it for myself. And now I’m giving it to you. So it’s yours now. You can do with it whatever you want.”

Noctis hates the tremble in her hands as she draws the entire long strand from where it’s coiled in the box: and she catches her breath, unable to count the pearls, unable to take her eyes from the breathtaking gradation of blue that runs from one end of the strand to the other. Faint hints of green and gray and purple, catching the low light of Prompto’s room.

“I, I, oh gods, Prompto, I might drop it,” she says, at last.

“Better not,” is the equally quiet response. 

And: “Let me?”

Noctis relinquishes the strand, hastily, gratefully: and then she’s staring, open-mouthed with her shock, as Prompto finds the clasps that are knotted loosely onto each end of the string of pearls. Snaps the clasps together to close the circle and then -- she’s rising onto her knees, she’s placing the makeshift necklace around Noctis’s neck -- 

The unimaginable lightness of it, the sheer breathtaking beauty of it -- Noctis wants to scream, wearing this thing -- 

Prompto is shaking her head. “Not good enough. Hold still.”

And still Noctis can barely breathe, but Prompto seems to know what she’s doing -- she doubles, and then triples the strand, and now it’s a collar that rests on Noctis’s shoulders -- it couldn’t be farther from the enormous weight of her golden yoke, and yet the weight of it, what it represents, how it got here in the first place -- these are all monstrous weights -- 

“Prompto,” she finally manages to say.

“You like it?” 

If that’s not a loaded question, then Noctis has never heard one of those in her life -- but there’s nothing for her to say anyway, except the truth. “I -- I do, I like it and, oh my gods, Prompto. _What have you done?_ ”

Prompto doesn’t answer, at least not in words: and Noctis almost forgets about the necklace when she moves.

Prompto, who is sliding off the bed, who is getting down on one knee. Head bowed. Voice clear. “I don’t know how anyone does this, but, but, let me ask, I have to ask,” she’s saying. 

“Prompto,” she begins, quietly.

“I wish to join your family. I wish to become part of the Lucis Caelum ranks. I wish to lay my life at your feet, and I promise to serve you, and I promise to obey you.” Prompto looks up, and smiles, a little. “I’ve never done this before. I know the words are all wrong. But -- I hope you’ll accept it. Even if the words aren’t right, I’m still saying them, and I still mean them. Every last word I just said.”

In trying to get to her feet, Noctis half-falls from the bed, and she has to catch herself on the edge that gives and squashes under her weight -- but she manages to stumble upright. 

Control, control, she has to regain control.

The words are nowhere near the right words. There’s a set formula for these things. An actual process. 

She throws the formula out, throws the process out, and she focuses on the intent behind the words.

“You’re serious about this,” she says, formal and stern, as she stands over Prompto.

“I, I -- yes. I’ve never been more serious about anything in my life,” she hears Prompto say.

Noctis smiles.

Touches the pearls, blue and precious, and nods to herself.

“There’ll be tests,” she says, quietly. “There’ll be, I’m sorry to say, there’ll be at least one interrogation. My mother, and the others in the family, they’ll do everything they can to determine that you can be loyal to us.”

“I’m not afraid,” is the reply, like steel, like steadfast resolve. “I’m not afraid. You can all do your worst -- tell your mother that, and tell your family that. Tell them. My exact words. Tell them, I shot my way out of Ardyn Izunia’s rathole. I survived him, I survived everything they ever tried to do to me. I, I can survive you, easy. And, Noctis, and you know why? It’s because this time, this time I know I’m doing it of my own free will.”

Despite herself, Noctis smiles. “You sound like Ignis.”

Prompto laughs, a little, and doesn’t move.

“As for me: I don’t care what anyone else in the family says. If you’re pledging yourself to me tonight, then I accept your pledge tonight. And I return it with one of my own.”

She smiles, to try and dispel the fear that still tightens the lines in Prompto’s face. “This is what we say, my mother and I, when we accept new people into the family,” she says, and she takes Prompto’s hands in her own. “We say: it’s your choice. All of this, from this night forward, it’s your choice to make. And if you choose to rise and join us, then we are glad of that choice, and glad of you, and we promise you our protection and our strength.

“So, so you, Prompto, you can choose now. There’s no shame in turning away. We won’t stop you if you decide to turn away from our terms. But if you do accept them, if you do rise: then we command you. We lead you. And you’ll follow us no matter where we go.” 

She has to catch her breath, now, where her words are starting to become too heavy and too powerful. “If you choose to rise, and if you choose to join us: then rise, as one of us. Rise, and go on, in the knowledge that whatever we ask you to do, we are ourselves willing to do, and we will be there with you every step of the way.”

Prompto gets to her feet, and her eyes are hard and clear.

Noctis nods, and lets her go, and touches the pearls she’s wearing with her fingers. “My mother’s not here, and for all we know she could overturn what I’ve said, and she can do that, if she really has to, and I won’t be able to do a fucking thing.”

“I understand.”

The resolve in Prompto’s eyes is too, too familiar: it’s the look Noctis sees whenever she dares to face a mirror.

More than enough to be going on with, she thinks, and so she says: “I’m Noctis Lucis Caelum. I swear to lead you, and I swear to stand by your side. I swear it on these blue pearls, on this treasure you’ve brought to me.”

And she waits, and smiles, and watches as Prompto figures it out.

“I’m Prompto Argentum,” she says, at last, and Noctis nods. “I swear to, to follow you, and I swear to stand by your side. I swear it on those pearls, on that treasure I gave you.”

“Yeah, that’s it,” Noctis says.

And then she closes the distance again, and kisses Prompto, gently, on the mouth. “Be a little more complicated if we go any further than this, though.”

“I can deal with complicated,” is the answer, sweetly breathless, and Prompto isn’t even trying to pull away, she thinks. Prompto is still right where she is, right where they’ve kissed, breaths warm and gusting together.

And those are Prompto’s hands winding into her hair. Vivid eyes full of steel and determination and, and a kind of strange and touching luminosity, something Noctis has never seen before or even expected. 

Unexpected, and completely new, like this: this kiss, Prompto’s kiss, and Noctis smiles and clutches her close, and falls headlong into her.


	8. Chapter 8

Soft soft breaths, next to her. Only a heartbeat away, to hear the wordless murmur, the steady rhythm, the rise and fall of chest, of shoulders. 

Hair, fluttering, with every exhalation.

Pinch of unexpected unwelcome cold at her toes -- and no wonder, because she’s managed to stick her foot out of the covers again, and she hurriedly draws that leg in, hurriedly sits on that draft-brushed foot, and her convulsive movement gets her a reaction: and Prompto looks again at the other person in the bed, the warm presence, the contraction of eyebrows.

“Hush, hush,” she says, wondering why she’s tripping over the words. Wondering why she’s hurrying to, to reassure this person, this sleeping Noctis, full-length and asleep. Maybe asleep. 

She pokes the nearest part of Noctis she can find with a finger: and the skin of Noctis’s arm is softly flushed, is softly warm.

Noctis doesn’t even twitch, in response.

And it’s Noctis who’s an unexpected and welcome presence, sleeping in this bed, sleeping in Prompto’s room. Noctis, in her skin and in her scars. The grayed-out lines and curves that make up the patterns in the sheets and in the blankets are draped over the shape of her. Flung out, flat on her back, arms stretched over her head, knees bent at an acute angle, ankles crossed. Wrists pushed delicately up against the flowers and vines that are carved to stand out from the headboard. Arms and shoulders wound in lines of ink and the repeating shapes of feathers, in the pieces of wings. Her hair, scattered over the pillow that she’s occupying, clinging to her cheeks, to the stubborn set of her jaw: and Prompto gives in to the desperate sweet impulse, and kisses Noctis’s temple, and she holds her breath immediately afterwards and murmurs quiet nonsense once again -- 

Noctis still doesn’t wake. 

But she sighs, deep and lonely, and turns her head, and now she’s looking away from Prompto.

Who sighs, sort of relieved, sort of bereft.

Noctis has a terrible habit of -- not being there, when Prompto wakes up from her scattered hours of sleep, and the problem with that is, she can’t even blame Noctis, can’t even bear a grudge against Noctis, in these days and nights. Noctis is who she is. 

And who she is, is -- 

_Donna._

Not for the first time, Prompto remembers the quiet tale, and the quiet tones shaping the title. 

Aulea is the head of the family. Is the head of the Lucis Caelums. 

And Noctis -- Noctis doesn’t hold any kind of lower rank. Noctis doesn’t bow to anyone, doesn’t even speak to her own mother with any kind of respect.

 _Donna,_ Prompto thinks: maybe she’s wrong about the ranks, maybe she’s wrong about the two of them, but maybe she’s not wrong either, maybe she’s not making a mistake, when she thinks of mother and daughter sharing the one single title, and neither of them diminished in the sharing.

She’s maybe been seeing more of both of them together, in the past few days: because she’s been explaining herself over and over and over again. Because she’s been picking at the scabs and the bones and the broken and still bleeding corpse of the story. The corpse of her story, of her history. Who she was. What she’d become. Where she’d been. 

“Why, why, why,” they all ask her.

They, meaning, the other members of the family. Men’s faces, women’s faces, stern and mocking and twisted in disbelieving lines. Why did you join the Izunia ranks? Why did you take the drug? Why did you escape? Why did you steal the pearl necklace?

And the questions fly at her, and Aulea and Noctis sit patient and silent and impassive at the head of the table, every time.

And she can’t even have the satisfaction of spitting a mouthful of Ardyn’s drug into the faces of her interrogators, for all of it that’s been forced down her throat. Can’t even have the satisfaction of erasing those almost-sneers by bringing up a mouthful and spitting it onto the table, onto the floor, onto them.

Even now, even here, the thought makes her hiss, and want to throw up: seven years of long nights. Seven years and that fucking tainted goblet on the table next to the bed that she was chained to. Seven years of being forced to develop a tolerance to the drug, slow slow drip of it into her veins, slow slow poison and the thorns of wanting, of craving, of needing. Slow to grow, and slow to leave her: even now, even here, there are moments when she wants to empty her stomach and all the veins beneath her skin. Moments when she wants to spill every single drop of her own drugged blood: spill it onto the floors of this place, onto the rich sheen of the sheets. 

Red blood, red drug, red hate.

She shivers, and presses her own hands over her ears, because any moment now she’ll hear that venomously sweet voice again, that gently cajoling demon’s mutter, clawing at her, claiming her -- 

The question she’s hearing is: _Why did you want to escape that prison?_

The question she’s hearing is: _What right did you have to want to escape that prison?_

“Regalia.”

That’s not a man’s voice.

Not Ardyn’s by a long shot: soft with sleep, soft because the sound is directed at the door out of the room. But the sound is, was, clear, and completely unexpected, and Prompto blinks and stares because Noctis is the only person who could have spoken. 

She certainly couldn’t have managed it, not here, not where the fear is winding around her again, cutting off the very pulse of her, cutting off the very voice of her -- 

But Noctis is only shifting in the bed, eyes closed, breathing even, hair in spikes trailing the movement of her. Sleeping, still, amazingly, as she turns, as she pulls one of Prompto’s pillows to her chest and curls around it, and the inked wings like a tangible presence that curves around her shoulders, onto her chest, startling and dark against the pale blue sheen of the beddings. 

Her forehead is all but mashed against Prompto’s hip, when she sighs and comes to a stop: heavy sweet weight of her, warmth of her soaking into Prompto’s chilled skin.

Like reassurance.

Fear bleeding away with every soft puff of damp air, Noctis’s exhalations, slow long caress.

And what does “regalia” even mean? What does it mean to Noctis? All Prompto knows is that it’s a word for someone’s finery, for someone’s jewels and baubles. The collar that Aulea wears around her neck. The rings on Noctis’s fingers. The chains trailing from their sleeves, mother and daughter both.

Is Noctis thinking about jewels, or dreaming about them, or does she mean something else entirely? She’s gone back to sleep, and maybe she doesn’t even know, Prompto thinks, maybe she doesn’t even know that she was talking, or that she said that one word out loud. Crisp syllables and the lilt of her accent on the final sound, her mouth still open now, still shaping it. Does Noctis have a habit of talking in her sleep? What else has she said? 

(Who has heard her talk in her sleep? Who knows what the words mean, what that word means?)

Prompto watches, helplessly, as Noctis sinks back into sleep completely unaware: and the change in her sleeping position means a change in the sounds of her, too. Just a little louder, just a little easier to hear -- the whistle of her as she inhales, as she exhales. 

And she’s helpless, too, comprehensively torn between the warring notions in her head. Should she stay here, wide awake and wide-eyed with the lingering fear, and hope Noctis can lull her back to sleep? Should she walk off her fears and the nightmares looming and lowering onto her shoulders? Should she find the nearest liquor cabinet and empty all its bottles down her throat? Should she wake someone else up, and inflict her own sorrows and her own shadows onto that someone else? 

Cindy has offered to teach her how to drive a car.

Ignis has invited her to the card games.

Iris has asked her to join the sparring sessions.

So they’re around. They’re here, in the Citadel, with her.

Aulea’s orders, for everyone to stay close -- and that, too, is directly related to what Prompto has done. Night after night she can see the smoke clogging the shadows, blotting out the remnants of the stars. Night after night the fires rage, and they’re creeping up on the Citadel, and on the scattered lights of the other families’ territories -- she shudders, in the here and now, remembering the blaze that nearly engulfed the Stormland area, the blaze that Noctis had watched from the windows in her quarters with her hands balled into helpless fists at her sides. 

Even when Ignis had coaxed Noctis to the game room, she had still stared in the direction of that territory, and she had not joined any of the card games that had sparked into reluctant slow action around her.

This is the here and this is the now: these are the long choking nights. 

Night after night, Insomnia burns -- Insomnia, city of Noctis’s birth, city of Noctis’s shattered inheritance -- and they all know who’s doing the burning.

Prompto knows who’s setting those fires.

Knows _why_.

The guilt is more than enough to propel Prompto from the bed -- but not before she kisses Noctis, not before she whispers apologies, not before she sends a message to Noctis’s phone:

_I promise I’m not going to run. I’ll be here. But, but I can’t breathe for my nightmares. And I don’t want you to catch them. I don’t want your sleep to be ruined by me. Please, sleep, and, and we’ll deal with everything else when you wake up,_

She doesn’t know what to say, after.

Noctis’s robe, thrown onto the chair nearest the door. Strange that it looks so plain: stiff gray material, with the seams picked out in dark green. Vines and leaves embroidered onto the belt.

Prompto ties it on, and takes a deep breath, and again the scent of bruised leaves and charred sap that seems to follow Noctis wherever she goes, fills all of her senses -- but she still can’t be calmed, not here, not now.

She sends the message, cut off as it is.

Cutting, cutting, the guilt and the fear that eats at her, that drives her blind and lost and searching and heedless through the corridors of the Citadel. Past the wavering flicker, flicker of golden lights in their dust-smudged sconces, well above her eye level. Past the ghostly cobwebs lacing the chandeliers. Past the doors upon doors, and she loses her way nearly the moment she steps away from her own quarters, because there are no identifying marks on the doors, because all the floors with their rooms and quarters and living spaces are decorated all the same, because she’s been here and she still needs a guide to find the armories and the libraries and the blank cold room where the others have been asking her their stupid, stupid questions.

She turns corners recklessly. She walks and walks. Her ankles hurt. Her heels.

She tells herself she’s not crying: she doesn’t know why she’s crying, anyway, so it’s easier to ignore the tears. Easier to ignore the sting and the stain of salt on her lips. Easier to run -- and she is, she’s kicking up her heels and she’s off, she’s on the run -- she can hear her own shocked gasps for breath, she can hear her own panicking footfalls, and she stops, suddenly, when she finds a door she can’t understand.

Plain tall doors, twice or thrice as tall as all the rest. Dark wood, held in sturdy frames and sturdy curls of dark metal. The doors hang ajar at the end of a set of wide corridors, enough that she can see wavering bars of light on the floor. Shadow of smoke, of fumes, the flicker of candlelight.

Whisk, thump. Whisk, thump.

She’s at the doors, without actually remembering when she crossed the last section of intersecting corridors. The bare polished floors, and the clear separation between the overlapping carpets and this brooding threshold. Dark chandeliers that hang still and watchful over the last crossing point.

She slips past the doors, and she’s expecting to find another strange and new room -- 

Not a room, she thinks, and all her thoughts stop dead.

Lines, standing tall, in neatly ordered ranks, fine-toothed against the walls. Arches set in rectangular frames, rising from the long lines of benches placed parallel to the walls, and her eyes are led inexorably towards the clear space at the other end of the long alley-like room. The clear space is wreathed in shadows and the fading echoes of her own footsteps.

She turns away from that clear space. 

The walls, the ceiling, they draw her eye like a compulsion: narrow arches in the ceiling, pointed and rising over the rectangle-framed ones. She can see the night sky through the second set of arches, where the windows are glazed in four-cornered patterns, and the panes alternate in outlines of silver and gold.

Something moves in the night sky -- something swift and winging past -- and she cringes, and throws up a hand to cover her face, and that’s when she sees the final set of patterns, etched into the stones beneath her feet.

Stone floors, here, but these stones are rough and unpolished. Like broken edges fitted together, like puzzle pieces that don’t quite mesh perfectly -- no two stones alike in their jagged sides, except for one thing.

Each stone at her feet is engraved with the outline of a sword -- and every sword at her feet is pointed in the exact same direction.

Each sword in this narrow hall is pointed towards the clear space that opposes the doors.

Each step echoes as she moves forward. Slow, at first: and the stones beneath her feet, the swords etched into the stones, appear and disappear from her view, as she moves past dark stands in twisted metal, as she moves past hissing and guttering candles. In the flickering light the stones almost writhe up to meet her, almost reach for her with dark hands -- 

Again that sound that had drawn her here, whisk and thump, and the flames growing brighter and stronger and steadier.

She’s almost on the edges of the clear space when a stooped bent shape steps into view.

She can still turn tail and run -- she can still turn away from the swords and their single path -- but the moon chooses that moment to unveil itself, its ashen red glare visible through the windows high up in the walls. Waning light, faint and struggling through the unraveling clouds, the choking smoke.

By the light of the candles, by the light of the moon, she picks out the details. Black gown, and the skirts falling to the floor, and the harsh reflections of flames in a hook-headed cane. Short hair cropped brutally short, silver having completely overtaken the black except at her temples. 

The woman nods to her, slow and knowing, and makes her way to one of the last benches: and carefully the woman braces herself on gnarled wrists to sit down, and her hands drip with ornate rings in gold and in black.

Her voice, rising, strong and clear in the hush of the hall. “Good evening.”

“Might be closer to midnight, or past it,” and Prompto bites at the corner of her mouth. “Um. Yes. Good evening.”

“I try not to think about what the actual time is,” is the reply: is the woman smiling? Is she smiling at her? 

Prompto bares her teeth in a makeshift grin.

“I won’t be offended if you don’t trust me, child,” the woman says. “I wouldn’t trust me, if I were meeting me in a place like this.”

“Where have I heard that one before?” But Prompto sits on the same bench, an arm’s-length away, and she leans forward to take the hand that’s offered: the hand that’s still wrapped around the cane. “I’m never going to stop meeting -- new people in this place, am I?”

“That’s the plan,” the woman says.

“As long as we all stay alive. I’m Prompto.”

“Ah yes, you’re young Noctis’s companion, are you not? I’ve certainly heard of you. My son, you see, he’s a gossip like all the rest of us.”

She blinks: once, twice. “Your son knows me? You can’t be Ignis’s mother; he said she died a few years ago. I, I don’t know the other guys, the ones who follow in Aulea’s wake, the ones who follow Crowe. That leaves -- ” She covers her mouth with a shaking hand. “Gladio. Is Gladio your son?” She blinks and finishes the question. “You’re his mother, and Iris’s?”

“Right in one,” the woman says. “I’m Ceres Amicitia.”

Prompto stares. “I, they don’t talk about you. Why don’t they talk about you?”

“Because I told them not to. Well, _tell_ is a mild word.” Ceres seems to sit taller. Seems to be sitting on a throne, now, with the arch of her neck and the twist of her mouth. “My children are under strict orders to not speak of me.”

“I don’t get to ask why.” Prompto takes a half-step backwards, and another.

“Oh, you do. I certainly won’t stop you. The real problem is, will I answer you?” Crooked sly not-even-a-smile. “Not now. But you won’t speak of me, either. Not to anyone within these walls, and certainly not to anyone outside. And trust me, my girl, I will know, if you slip -- and the penalty for speaking of me is death.”

“Fair enough,” Prompto says. “But am I still allowed to speak _to_ you?”

That smile turns into a short sharp bark of a laugh. “Well you got there faster than anyone else did. Yes, you may speak to me. But I will still choose whether I will answer you or not.”

“Well, yeah,” Prompto says.

And she thinks of the whispers, of the sneers, that had persisted in the wake of every single one of her _interviews_.

She’s still sore from the barbed words, from the callous questions, and maybe that’s what makes her say, “They call you Aulea’s left hand.”

“Is that what I am? Is that what she needs? I don’t know. All I know is, Noctis is her right hand and that is precisely how it should be,” she hears Ceres say. “She is not her mother’s spitting image. But they share the steel in their hearts, wouldn’t you say so?”

“Steel like the barrel of a gun, yeah,” she says, but she’s thinking of an entirely different Noctis when she says it: the Noctis tangled in sheets and blankets, the Noctis who talks in her sleep. 

“I taught her, you know, her and her mother both. I taught them how to shoot all kinds of very fun and very strange firearms. I hear you’re not so bad yourself.”

Prompto tries to smile, and knows she doesn’t quite make it. “I have to be better than that. Better than _not so bad_. If I want Noctis to live through this shit of a night, if I want her to make it out of this whole fucking thing alive,” and she gestures at the windows, “then I have to be the best.”

“There’s no such thing.”

Prompto blinks at the woman. “Meaning?”

“You can only compete to be the best at shooting things when you’re shooting at agreed-upon targets,” she hears Ceres say. “Would you consider Ardyn Izunia to be an agreed-upon target?”

“Yes, absolutely. In this family? Are we talking about just the Lucis Caelums? Then yeah,” she says. “This entire family’s got a target painted on his back. The back of his head. Because he painted one on them for, for shits and giggles. At least that’s how I understand all the stories.”

Short bark of a laugh. Not a confirmation, and not a denial of what she’s just said. “And elsewhere?”

“I don’t care about them,” she mutters.

“Doesn’t mean I’m not right.”

“Can I shoot them all? Like, can I put a bullet into everyone who thinks the sun shines out of Ardyn’s ass? Because ugh,” and again this isn’t a place where Prompto can spit onto the ground, to get rid of the bitter taste of her own words. She’s not interested in staining the swords engraved into the stones. “I would, I would kill him if I had the chance. And then find some kind of shitty crazy magic to bring him back to life so I could kill him again. Rinse and repeat,” she says, shuddering with every word.

Quiet scraping sigh, like the wind dragging along weathered stones, like the last whisper of a departing storm. “And when you’ve killed him a hundred times, a thousand times, are you going to feel better?”

She thinks about it, or forces herself to think about it. “Maybe.” A better idea strikes her, then. “Or. Or. Since you’re talking about me feeling better, then, then maybe I’ll bring him back to life so I can watch Noctis kill him a hundred thousand times.”

Silence. 

She breathes, and thinks, and groans. “But that’s not going to bring people back to life, is it? I don’t mean, like, bringing Ardyn back to life in order to shoot him again. I mean, that’s not going to bring back the ones you’ve lost. The ones I’ve lost.”

“Mmmm,” she hears Ceres say. “Death. Loss. Sometimes the latter is reversible. But then you’d still be carrying the scars of it around. Even if what you lose is restored to you, you’ll still know what it was like to lose, and that’s just a plain and painful fact.”

She clutches at her heart, and nods. “Painful. Yeah. So what should I do?”

“I believe you already answered your own question.”

“What?” She has to try and remember. “Oh. Wait. Now you’re talking about what I said about Noctis. Because I said: I want her to live. Make it through this night and all the other nights to come.”

“That is what we wish for her, too.” Another gusty sigh. “I want my friend to survive. I want Aulea to survive.”

“Not what it’s looking like, out there,” and Prompto sighs, too.

“As I understand.” 

Shift, and rustle, and she watches in amazement as Ceres extracts a pack of cigarettes and a lighter from somewhere in her sleeves. Taps out a stick and lights it, and takes a deep drag. “Oh. Forgive me my rudeness. Do you smoke?”

“Nope,” Prompto says. “But don’t let me stop you.”

“Lousy habit anyway, so, here.”

And Prompto stares when Ceres offers her a small leatherbound flask instead. “Seriously?”

“Gladiolus’s, not mine.”

Prompto takes it, and frowns, and mutters, “I’m going to regret this, I don’t even know what he drinks.”

Scent of honey and spices that burns her throat going down, rough cloying thick, like spikes on her tongue and in her throat. “Ugh,” she mutters, and passes the flask back.

Tries to.

She watches Ceres shake her head. “Return it to him. Or not. I don’t care, and he might, but that’s your problem and not mine.”

“Lousy taste in drinks, your son.”

“Maybe.” Rusty chuckle.

“Did I do something wrong?” And Prompto finally gives voice to her frustrations. “I mean. I knew I was doing something completely hare-brained. I knew that there would be consequences to doing the thing that I did. But the way everyone else in your family is talking, you’d all be better off if I was thrown out of this place.”

“Well I’m not part of those interviews. Interrogations.” She hears Ceres snort. The sound seems to suit the black skirts. “I wish you’d thought about your timing. That’s all the objection you’re getting out of me, really. We need to consolidate, we need to have a better idea of all our numbers -- and I’m not just talking about the Lucis Caelums, mind. We’re not the only family trying to off the Izunias. Or trying to off that asshole in particular. But we’re not going to succeed that easily. We need people, and I didn’t say we need cannon fodder, and I don’t truly give a damn what some of the others think.” Another disparaging sound. “Do you play chess?”

“No.”

“I used to play with, with Weskham.” The name is familiar. “And my husband and I would try to team up against Regis. Maybe we won about, hmm, forty percent of those matches? The man was formidable. I still miss playing with him. We’d gamble for, for hot cinnamon candies.”

“That sounds just as horrible as whatever’s in this flask.”

That gets her a wave of the hand and the cigarette still caught between bent fingers, tinder-flaring tip glowing in her direction for a moment. “Don’t knock those until you’ve tried them.”

“No thanks.”

“Your funeral.” Rasp and stream of smoke, as Ceres takes another drag. “I asked because this thing you’ve done, these nights that are going on, are horrifying and wrong, but -- they can still be moves in the chess game. The game we’re playing now. We just have to find the right moves that will get us to some kind of victory.”

“I, I’m not really thinking about victories, honestly,” and Prompto shakes her head. “And I didn’t come here looking for, for a funeral. Mine or yours or anyone else’s. I don’t want one. At least, not yet. That’s, that’s dumb. I know that. We’re all the walking fucking dead from the day we’re born. We’re all born to head straight for the fucking grave. But, but if I’m alive, if somehow I’m not dead yet, then, then why don’t I do something about it?” 

Deep breath, juddering through her, past her. “Why did I do the thing? It’s because I’m alive, and I want someone dead. Dead at my hands. Not because of shit like cancer. I, I,” and she gets to her feet. Turns away from Ceres, from the moonlight, from the fading shadowed stars. “You can all do whatever you want to me. I, I’m done with caring about what you think of me. Do whatever you want, just let me be with Noctis till I have to drop dead or, or something like it. Let me be with her until I choose to leave her. And in the meantime I’ll choose, I’ll choose to follow her where she goes. I’ll follow her where she leads me. And that’s all I really need to know or do or be.”

“That’s not up to me,” she hears Ceres say.

“Not yours but mine, old friend.”

Flares of light in the clear space in the hall: and Prompto sees a small door, wide open now, where it had previously been hidden in the shadows, just in the very farthest corner.

“Drama queen,” she hears Ceres say, or scoff.

“I had a good teacher,” is the response from Aulea Lucis Caelum, upright proud shadow of her. 

Rude gesture, punctuated with the wisping smoke from the cigarette.

The sliver-smiles fly right over Prompto’s head -- she’s too busy shivering, too busy fighting to keep meeting that stern blue gaze, that storm-regard. 

And Aulea stops walking when she’s only an arm’s-length away. “I won’t insult you by asking if you meant what you said, about Noctis.”

Bad time to freeze, she thinks -- and so she nods, once. “Then what do you want to me -- _Donna_.”

“I want you to -- forgive me,” is Aulea’s quiet reply.

Closer, closer, Aulea is stooping towards her -- is kissing her forehead. Cool touch, brief bright brand.

And she only has time to blink, blink, before: Aulea’s hand is moving, blurring --

How is she on the floor? Why is her cheek stinging and tingling -- bruise, she’s going to bruise, she blinks and immediately feels the pain like thorns in all of the nerves in her face, pain in the shape of a hand-print --

She blinks again and the world around her resolves into the stones that are cutting past her layers and into her shoulders. Into the hunched shape of Ceres and the gleam of her cane.

And the world around her resolves into the shape of Aulea standing over her. Hand and arm still in the follow-through, still in the curve, and because her ears are ringing and her teeth are nearly chattering, it takes Prompto a long time to put all the pieces properly together.

The pieces: Aulea’s stance now, and the blur of her moving hand, and the all-consuming explosion of impact.

The whole: Aulea, slapping her, and hitting like the fists of a thousand enraged gods.

A long time before she says, “What the -- what did you hit me for?”

That same hand that had struck her -- is extended to her, now, and Prompto has to fight down the instinct to bare her teeth -- has to fight the instinct to roll away.

She’s tense, when she finally does take Aulea’s hand.

She’s expecting to be swatted away again. Harder, or worse.

Instead Aulea only smiles, and takes her by her shoulders, and murmurs, “It was necessary for me to strike you. That is how the rules go, in this family.”

“Rules.” Prompto doesn’t bother to hide the growl in the word -- there’s no room to hide it, she thinks.

“Did you tell Noctis what you said? Did you make any promises to her?”

Promises. 

She blinks. 

Thinks maybe she knows what’s happening, now, and that’s why she asks.

“Yes. Yes I did. I -- you need to hear it from me? You need me to, to swear to you too?”

“No.”

Prompto does take a step backward, then. “Excuse me?”

“Just put her out of her misery already,” she hears Ceres mutter.

Quick shake of Aulea’s head. “Shut it, Ceres.”

“Shut it yourself.”

Prompto stares when Aulea rolls her eyes, and looks very much like Noctis in the doing, and she crosses her arms over her chest. Thinks she wants to glare at the two women.

Eventually Aulea walks over to Ceres and slaps her on the back of her head -- only to step away quickly, when Ceres brandishes her cane at her.

And she turns back to Prompto. Intensity in every line of her, in every word: “You swore your life to my daughter?”

Prompto bares her teeth again. “I did. I swore it straight to her face. I’m hers. I guess that means I’m yours too.”

“And that is why I had to strike you. So we each remember our promises. Your life to Noctis. Your life to me. And in return: my family and all it is, all it has, to you.” 

Hiss of a wind that snuffs out the candles, a wind that flings clouds past the moon, but Prompto can still see Aulea, wrapped in shadows, in the whispering shiver of her clothes. “Ceres, would you do the honors?”

Steady, hoarse voice. “I’ve been told over and over again I don’t speak for the whole family, but hang them. Anyway Gladiolus has told me plenty, and Iris has told me plenty, and between them and literally the whole fucking world, it’s no contest at all. My children’s words trump everyone else’s. So -- Prompto -- what’s your last name, girl? Do you have one?”

“Argentum,” she says.

“Very well then. Prompto Argentum. You look like you made a choice and you walked right into it with open eyes, so I won’t bother you with any foolish questions. Take a knee.”

“You have made your promises to my daughter, and to me -- and so you have made your promises to us. You have bound yourself to her and to me and to us, of your own free will. So, rise, Prompto Argentum,” she hears Aulea say, right on Ceres’s heels, “rise and know who you are. Know that you’re one of us.”

She gets to her feet.

The other set of doors flies open.

“Oh for crying out loud, more drama,” Ceres says.

Prompto turns around.

Cindy and Iris and Ignis and Gladio, disheveled. Sleep-mussed sleeves and unstyled hair standing in all kinds of lopsided spikes, and Iris and Gladio are leaning visibly on one another, and Ignis is trying to hide a yawn in his collar, and Cindy’s hair is still wrapped up in some kind of colorful cloth.

And at the front of them all: Noctis. Still wearing the shorts and the skimpy tank top she’d gone to bed in, and Prompto crosses the distance between them, and drops the entire breadth of the robe -- Noctis’s robe -- back onto her shoulders.

“Nice sleepwear,” she hears Gladio slur out.

The t-shirt hangs off her shoulders, and its hems hit right at her knees, and the bird-shapes on the front are worn away.

Noctis yawns, and the sight of her makes Prompto pull her close -- arm around her shoulder, and the warmth of her radiating.

But when Noctis speaks she sounds distinctly disgruntled. “What the fuck is going on and why are we all here looking like the worst costume party ever?”

“Good one,” she hears Ceres cackle. 

“Thanks,” is Noctis’s response. 

And, low and serious: “Mother.”

Aulea’s smile is still startling. “Since you went ahead and took a promise from, from Prompto without letting anyone else know -- I simply did the exact same thing.”

Prompto watches as Noctis’s hand flies to her throat, and she knows what the gesture means and she really, really wants to kiss Noctis right now -- 

“Mother,” she hears Noctis say, again. “You -- you hit her and everything?”

“Yes. And I asked her to get to her feet. She took the blow without flinching. She got on her knees and then stood up. So you know what that means.”

Those sweet sharp eyes, turned on her: and Prompto gives in to the temptation, because, again, she’s alive and so is Noctis, so she shrugs, and presses a kiss into Noctis’s dark hair. 

“Prompto,” she hears Noctis say. “Your message. I read your message. Are you all right?”

“Then you know I wasn’t okay when I got up. But now, now, maybe now things will be a little bit better.”

“That’s a good thing,” she hears Ignis say.

Noctis asks the necessary question. “You sure.”

“Yeah,” and Prompto kisses her on her cheek, this time. “I didn’t want to believe it before. I still can’t mostly believe it. But maybe we can find a way for things to be okay.”

The reward for her truth is this: Noctis’s hands warm on her cheeks, holding her firmly in place in this night, in this world, and a return kiss planted squarely on her mouth.

Noctis pulls away after a little eternity, after only a heartbeat, and Prompto watches her stalk toward her own mother, toward the women in black, and clenches her fists for the loss.

But the others surround her, gently, and Iris is looking at her with careful and patient eyes. “You want ice for that?”

“Or something to make the swelling go down, at least,” Cindy says.

“Why am I not surprised,” Prompto mutters, “that Noctis’s mom hits like a hundred brick walls?”

Quiet amused snort, that seems to be coming from Gladio’s direction. “Don’t know what you expected. She knocks me down, I gotta take five before I get back up.”

“Every single time,” and it’s not a joke, the way Iris says it, the way she winces because maybe she’s remembering a blow of her own.

“My rooms are closest,” Ignis says. 

“And Noctis?” Prompto asks.

“She’ll know to follow.”

And she thinks she wants to droop onto Ignis’s shoulders, where the sleep that coils insistently around her ankles and her wrists is now pulling her down, down, steady sucking down --

“ _Donna_! Lady Ceres!”

Through the open doors, a whirl of skewed collar-points and stained suit jacket and backwards cap.

Prompto’s only the first one to dodge -- but it’s Iris who reaches the newcomer first. “Talcott!”

“Miss Iris,” the boy says. He really is no more than a boy, Prompto thinks, shorter than Iris, broad forehead and round cheeks -- and the brass knuckles on his right hand fit him perfectly, as does the snub-nosed pistol holstered at his hip. “They asked if they could come in, and they asked if they could see -- ”

Prompto watches his eyes widen. 

“They asked to see all of you.”

“Who’s them?”

Noctis.

The weight of her, upright and strong, and her arm coiled around Prompto’s waist.

The sweet power of her voice. The movement of her free hand, where she’s hooking her thumb over her shoulder. “I’m here, Talcott. And so are they. Who is asking for us?”

Prompto’s first instinct is to smile, and ask, as gently as she can: “Talcott, right? I’m Prompto. Do you think I could borrow your gun?”

“Hi Prompto,” she hears him say -- and then she’s accepting the pistol from his hands. Check, check, ready to cock and fire -- 

The others go tense around her, too: Iris and Gladio, moving to stand with their mother, and Ignis and Cindy flanking Aulea, and Prompto musters up another smile, and follows Noctis and all of the others out the door --

Elevator, at an intersection of corridors, and -- it chimes, loudly. The up arrow over the doors lighting up.

Prompto goes down to one knee, and aims.

Crowe, stepping out, and her weary worried eyes. “Stand down. I mean it. Nobody do anything stupid.”

“What’s going on here.” Aulea, calm.

Prompto glances over her shoulder. 

Sees those eyes gone hard as steel.

Steel in Noctis, too, where she’s poised on toes, tense as if to strike, even with Crowe’s words.

A handful of guards shuffle out of the elevator.

And in their wake, two women in stained and dust-smudged white, and ragged bandages, and makeshift weapons: a bloody crowbar, a wickedly curved long blade -- 

And the older of the two women seems to pull on a weary smile, when she says, “I think, Aulea, this counts as an emergency.”

“I don’t doubt you broke the glass, old friend -- but what else did you break in the process?” 

And that’s Aulea, all right, striding right past her, striding right past the guards, and taking that woman dressed in white into her arms.

Ceres only takes longer to join them -- but that’s precisely what she does, and she holds both Aulea and the other woman close.

“Hi,” says the younger woman, the one in the shredded white suit, the one holding the crowbar. And steady on her feet she might be, but there’s nothing steady in her words. “Long time no see.”

“Lunafreya,” she hears Noctis say -- 

But it’s Ignis who blurs into shocking movement, who all but hurls himself at the girl named Lunafreya, and her weapon drops to the floor with a shockingly loud clang as he pulls her close, as he is pulled into her desperate ragged embrace.

The sobs of him and her, rising, quiet and choking entwined.

Prompto gets to her feet, slowly, and takes Noctis’s hand.

She has to ask.

“Trouble?”

Slow nod. Slow shift. Noctis leaning into her again. 

“The worst kind: and that’s not the real problem.”

She goes rigid at the hitch in Noctis’s breathing. “Tell me.”

“The third one’s still missing. Do you know who they are? The one with my mother, that’s Sylva. And the other one is Lunafreya. The Nox Fleurets.”

Prompto gulps, and doesn’t take her eyes from Ignis, from the way he’s holding on to Lunafreya.

From the way he keeps looking up and around as if to search for a presence that isn’t anywhere around.

“I, the name’s familiar. They’re associated with Insomnia like you are?”

“Insomnia was theirs, before all this started,” and the words come out like hammer-blows, like stabbing knives. “They were its leaders. There used to be a lot more of them, but, but the gangs happened, you know? The other families, the ones we’re fighting?”

“Yeah,” and she doesn’t flinch when Noctis’s grip on her hand tightens and tightens, enough to bruise, enough to hurt. She doesn’t take her hand back.

“And now there aren’t any Nox Fleurets left, except for them. They’re the last ones. The real problem is this: there are still only two of them, when there should be three. Only means one thing.”

She can almost feel the world grow colder. 

What does that icy hard edge in Noctis’s words mean?

“Ceres. Aulea. I think my son might be dead,” the woman named Sylva says. 

“Ravus,” she hears Lunafreya sob.


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Rating changes because of this chapter -- smut ahead :)

Everything hurts.

Rust and copper and the air that churns in the wake of a rainstorm, that’s the blood on her tongue, that’s the blood that she can feel heavy on her own skin. Shriek and whine and the evil echoes in these cramped streets -- no room to maneuver, almost no room to dodge, and the bullets are still coming for them, the bullets and the shouts of the soldiers in pursuit. Nerves frayed and gnawed, gone dead and numb and still screaming with pain, and that doesn’t make sense, that doesn’t make sense -- 

How do they get into these things? How has she let herself get into these things? Because she can feel the mad shudder of her laboring heart, the jagged edges in every breath she takes. The weight of a passenger leaning into her back. She can’t remember how any of this happened: the roar of the motorcycle as it chews up the road, seemingly to no avail. The whine and the clattering death in pursuit, gunfire and the ugly screams issuing from ugly faces. The barest inch before her knee kisses the road, as she banks into a sharp turn and then another, threading the impossible maze of the streets and she’s supposed to be heading back, she’s supposed to be making her way to Lucis Caelum territory and -- and where is she now? 

The world is a confused blur where it’s pressing in on her. The weight of the bike that’s all that stands between her and a certain death by collision, her skin and blood and bones pulped and smeared into the ground. The weight of her passenger -- and who is this passenger of hers, anyway? She can’t even turn her head to see a face she can recognize, because her passenger’s helmet has a visor tinted in dead black. The weight of the soldiers in pursuit, the weight of their chattering guns, the weight of the bullets that are still flashing past her, all around her. The weight of her own helmet, the jacket she’s wearing, the strange thing that’s clasped around her neck that she can’t even make out by touch, can’t even recognize, everything muddled and sheering away in the breakneck speed of trying to make it out of this one alive -- 

Swerve, swerve, and she makes the bike leap over some strange heap that -- in her wake -- rises and rises and grows and she screams as she glances in the wing mirrors, because she recognizes that shape, that rictus of agony and amusement and mindless lawless evil. The shape of the death that stalks her in her dreams, the death that reaches for her and threatens to drown her in mauve and gaudy white lace on tattered black velvet, the death that stinks of hospital rooms and too many narcotics and that cursed fucking red drug, that distilled horror -- 

As soon as she realizes that she’s being held down somehow -- iron grip of her passenger, iron grip of someone outside the dreams, forcing her still -- she sobs and regrets that one sound and tries to clench her jaw against all the other breaths, all the other screams, all the other prayers for things like mercy and leniency and kindness -- these things are impossible to wish for and impossible to find -- she feels saltwater trickling from the corners of her eyes and she cries out, small broken sound, small broken word: “Please.”

She doesn’t want her sobs to be the last sound she ever makes before the bullets rip her to pieces -- 

“Prompto.”

The world falls away. The evil shadows, the roaring engines, the flying bullets.

What remains? The weight that had been at her back.

The weight that is still holding her, but not to dig wounds into her. Weight of hands curled around her shoulders, pulling her fast and close against that warmth, that one who’d spoken her name.

That voice, powerful, sweet, dark.

Worried.

She knows that voice.

And she makes herself open her eyes, makes herself swallow back the cursed dreams and the fruitless useless screams for help that will never come -- 

“Come back to me, Prompto. Come back -- now.”

She gasps in a breath and looks over her shoulder.

Noctis.

Wide awake and barely dressed -- the straps of the flimsy nightie she’s wearing, unraveling lace, are fraying away -- muscles bunching along her arms, and now Prompto can feel the full weight of Noctis, the full strength she’s brought to bear, holding her -- but not to pull her down. Not to trap her. 

Holding her to anchor her, to steady her, to pull her back to reality and the idea, the realization, of where she is.

“Let me go,” she says, and she hates the jagged whisper of her own voice. How long has she been screaming? There’s no way of knowing for sure. 

“I will. But stay with me, that’s all I want you to do, stay,” she hears Noctis say -- and then Noctis’s hands go loose and soft and gentle, and fall away.

Instinctively, Prompto leans her head back onto Noctis’s shoulder, just to linger, just to think about maybe reassuring herself and reassuring Noctis, too -- and then she struggles up to a sitting position, and she pulls off the button-down shirt she’d worn half-fastened to bed, and drapes it over Noctis’s shoulders.

“You’re always covering me up,” Noctis mutters, but she looks wry and sweet and amused. “You don’t like looking at me?”

Prompto blinks, blinks, and doesn’t think, when she answers. “I can’t stop looking at you, I thought you got that message by now, since only everyone else in your family, in your circle, has seen the way I look at you.”

Soft laugh, in return, knowing. 

“I like seeing the shape of you in this world. But you look like you’re always cold, and you dress weird, sometimes, and I don’t get that.”

Noctis’s eyes go wide for only a moment. “That’s -- but I’ve been -- you mean you never noticed, all those times I was standing next to you?”

Prompto blinks again. “Noticed what?”

“Oh, wow, you’re sweet,” Noctis says, before pulling her close. “There. Notice that? Tell me what my hand feels like on your skin. My arm around your shoulder.”

The smell of Noctis, like lemon and crushed grass, like sea-winds. 

That, and the warmth that leaches steadily into her, that flows into her like she’s soaking up the sun -- like Noctis is a flame to warm herself over.

“I,” Prompto begins. “I like the way you feel against me. I can smell your perfume, and I feel warm when I’m next to you. You mean that’s not just my imagination?”

Noctis grins. “Nope; it’s not you, it’s me,” and Noctis is giggling. “I run warm, I always have -- why do you think I run around in -- short dresses?”

“Style. And you have really pretty legs.”

That laugh redoubles and is joined by a blush. “That’s not what I meant, but thank you -- but what I was trying to say was, if I wear things like, like stockings, like those pretty skintight things that Iris and Cindy like to wear, I’d suffocate. I’m not even joking. I’d overheat in a hurry. I cover up only when I have to. When it snows, when it storms, shit like that. Be an undignified death otherwise if I dropped dead of overheating.”

“What,” Prompto says.

Shrug of those elegant shoulders. “You didn’t even notice you were the only one using in blankets, when you’re sleeping in my bed.”

“I don’t like feeling cold,” Prompto mutters, after a moment.

“So take this back. Stay warm.”

Her shirt in Noctis’s hands, and now back on her own shoulders, and gratefully Prompto does some of the buttons up, just enough to cover the tank top and the shorts she’s been sleeping in.

Leaving Noctis uncovered once again, the great raptor bird on display, and the unruly lengths of her hair. The worry in her eyes. “Bad dreams again?”

And Prompto winces and looks down at her own hands where she’s twisting them together in her lap. “Yeah. I get them most nights, actually. I just don’t wake up screaming, or wanting to scream, every time.” She winces. “You can’t actually be getting any sleep when I’m in bed with you.”

Shake of Noctis’s head, negating. “I sort of thought you might be like me. I guess I was right, and I didn’t want to be proven right. But yeah. I don’t sleep much because of the nightmares. Night after night, a whole fucking parade of them, like, I’m used to them by now, and I don’t wake up screaming any more. This shit of a life, you know? I have my nightmares and you have yours, and -- and it turns out we’ve just been having our nightmares side by side. Only difference is that yours still make you scream.”

Before Noctis can finish speaking, she’s gathering her up, she’s holding her close, and she’s sure it’s not her imagination: Noctis is clutching back at her. The fists pulling at the tails of her shirt, like her own hands white-knuckled around Noctis’s arms.

“Fuck,” she whispers.

“Pretty much.”

When Noctis moves again, Prompto follows suit, and it takes them a few moments before they can really fit their elbows and their feet and the rest of their bodies into adjacent spaces: but when they settle, Noctis is sitting with her knees drawn up, hunched over and steady in the open diamond formed by Prompto’s bent legs -- knees splayed apart, and feet together. 

Noctis sighs, and lays her head back against Prompto’s shoulder, and in return Prompto presses her cheek and her temple to Noctis’s. 

“I can tell you about my nightmares if that’ll make you feel better,” she hears Noctis say, after a while.

“Whatever you want,” is not what Prompto’s been meaning to say, but that’s what comes out of her mouth.

“Oh. Whatever I want? I don’t want to talk about that shit. Having the nightmares is bad enough. And I’m guessing you’re not gonna want to tell me about yours.”

“Red,” is all Prompto says, half a curse, half a groan. “Red evil everything.”

“Ugh. Don’t tell me. Or, maybe, don’t talk about it.”

“So why did you even offer?” But Prompto finds a small laugh to add on at the end of the question.

“I have no fucking idea,” is the response, threaded with an equally fragile laugh. “Probably I just want someone to tell me everything’s going to be okay, even when I know and they know and the whole fucking world knows that’s the biggest lie we’ve ever told.”

“It’s just that we want to believe it, even when we know how much of a lie it is,” she says, quietly. 

“The truth, right there,” she hears Noctis say.

She gives in to the impulse to kiss the shell of Noctis’s ear, then: that uneven curve, half-swathed in dark hair. 

After that it’s only a breath and a sigh and then the words come out, the lie they’ve agreed on: “Everything’s going to be okay.”

She absorbs the sound of Noctis’s breaths, the soft quiet shuddering rhythm of her.

“I almost believe you,” she hears Noctis say, after a while.

“I don’t. Believe myself.”

“I can lie to you.”

“Yeah? I know you can. I know you can lie to anyone and everyone and get away with it. But. But, could you -- could you not? Don’t lie to me,” and Prompto hates that she sounds so small and so helpless. “I don’t want you to lie to me.”

“I try not to. I did everything I could so I wouldn’t have to lie to you. I mean, before, before that thing that happened. The pearls, and then my mom hitting you. Before then, I was already trying to just -- tell you all the truths that I _could_ tell you.”

“No, I get that,” Prompto mutters, wearily. “Maybe there was some part of my brain that understood that that was what you were trying to do. There were some things you couldn’t tell me, because I was nobody to your family.”

“Nobody to my family, maybe, but not nobody to me. I need you to understand that. You never were nobody to me. Even though you keep calling yourself that. I wish you wouldn’t.”

“I’m trying.”

“Okay, Prompto. Okay. That’s all we ask, all I ask.” 

Hands, coming up to wrap around one of hers.

Prompto breathes out, quietly, and brings up their joined hands.

Kisses Noctis’s knuckles -- left hand. Right hand. 

She finds herself looking into those depthless strange eyes when she’s done lingering -- eyes that haven’t quite lost their steely edges, eyes that are still ruthless and calculating, but -- not to harm her, she thinks.

Not to harm her.

She asks, anyway, futile though the words might be in this life.

“Don’t hurt me.”

The response, when it comes, is not in words: the response is Noctis turning around to face her. Rising up onto her knees, but maybe not to loom over her, maybe not to look down on her. 

Rough fingertips dancing down her cheeks, stroking featherlight and sweet, and for some reason this touch, this intimacy, this continuing gentleness of Noctis drives her to the edge of tears.

Noctis keeps smiling, and now she’s pushing the tears away, pushing them back into Prompto’s hair, sweeping them away. 

Her heart is -- full in a way she can’t describe.

And Noctis beats her to the draw, when she starts speaking, soft and low and compelling -- words like vines, wrapping around Prompto, filling her up. “Let me tell you something though. I have to tell you this thing. Because tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow -- Insomnia will keep on burning and, and at some point we’ll be done with building our defenses and that means we’ll have to start going on the offensive. It’s war out there. We’re going to have to fight it out eventually. And, and you know what that means.”

“No, I don’t, I’ve never been to war before,” Prompto whispers.

“You fired the first shot,” Noctis says, but she sounds only like she’s stating a fact, as she taps at her own throat. “And we were getting to that point sooner or later. We’re in it now. We’re fighting it now. Tomorrow we may win something. Tomorrow we may lose something. Now there’s really no way of knowing what tomorrow brings. So we’ve got to live in the here and now. Since all we’ve got are stupid silly chances.”

“Noctis,” Prompto says, trying to follow the shape of those quiet thoughts, those matter-of-fact words. 

“Better to take those stupid silly chances than, than to have no chance at all.”

“Noctis,” she tries again. “What is it you want to tell me?”

“You still think you can handle complicated? Complicated, as in, you and me? Me being who I am and you being what you are. I’m more than complicated, and you’re more than complicated.” Small smile. It doesn’t suit Noctis at all, to look so tentative. “You still want to take your chances with me?”

She has to think about it -- or does she? 

“Why are you willing to take your chances with me?” is what she asks. “I, I mean. You could be with anyone. You could have anyone. You’re gorgeous and you’re good to the people you consider your own, and you’re probably worse than a demon to everyone else. You -- why me? Why pick me?”

Too late she hears the words that she’s just been saying, and she claps her hands over her mouth, and she can’t take those words back.

Incredibly, Noctis is still smiling at her. Is drawing closer, to kiss the hand that’s covering her mouth. “That’s why. Or that’s part of why. Prompto. You just called me a demon. And, and you know by now that’s just exactly who I am. They call me so many terrible things outside the Citadel -- ”

“Not even outside of it -- ”

“Yes. That too.” Noctis’s hands, carding through her hair. “And you?”

“Me,” Prompto mutters. “Liar, spy, traitor, I don’t know what else. I just, I just think I’m not at all a good person. How can I be? The entire long fucking list of people I’ve killed only begins with my friend.”

“And what did they tell you, before you got away? What did you know about me, before you escaped?”

Eyes flying wide open in shock. “Ardyn lied about you. Just, that’s all he ever had to say about you. That you were planning to raze Insomnia to the ground and all the souls still left in it. But that wasn’t you, that was _him_. And, and the other bits -- I asked the others -- you didn’t kill the others. The ones who shared your bed. Aranea. The other one, the scholar, you didn’t kill her either. You did what you could to send them away to safety.”

“Ravus,” she hears Noctis say, as she pulls back.

Prompto blinks, taken aback. “That guy? The one who might be dead?”

“I might have sent him to his death. Or I caused him to disappear, when we broke up, and now he might be dead.”

“No one told me about him,” and Prompto racks her brains for the stories told in quiet words. Iris’s clear-eyed assessments, and Cindy’s opinions. 

“I told people they weren’t allowed to talk about him, not then, not ever. Didn’t expect it to stick, but here we are.”

“You were together,” Prompto says. 

Nod, short and sharp. 

“What do you have to do with him? His family, they only got here a few weeks ago, and they said he might be dead when they got here -- I thought they meant he’d been killed recently -- ”

Noctis’s mouth thins into a pained line. “We were together, and then he disappeared after we broke up, and every lead we followed for two years, three years, went to nothing. We couldn’t find any trace of him. We still haven’t found any trace of him, and I’ve been looking on my own. Now it’s his own mom who believes he’s dead and, and I think she blames me a little.”

“Why did he disappear -- did you tell him to, like, get lost or something? No, bad choice of words, I’m guessing it wasn’t the nice kind of break-up -- ”

She supposes she deserves the sour grimace that gets her. “I just told him we were done.”

“And then he went away after.”

“Yes.”

“You said you looked for him. You said you tried to find him.”

“Never found him,” and she watches as Noctis bites savagely at her own lip.

“So, so that’s nothing to do with you and me. Okay, no, it has something to do with you. But if you want to call yourself a monster because that guy disappeared after you broke up, I don’t get it. You didn’t, like, you didn’t point a gun at him or anything.”

“Would you believe me if I said I did?”

“I’d ask you why you did it.”

Blink.

“I can’t tell whether you’re on my side or not,” she hears Noctis say.

“I’m not a big fan of judging people,” she says. Sighs, really. It’s all making her head spin and she’s already weary and hurting. “I am tired of being judged. I don’t intend to judge you, not in a hurry, not for this or anything. I, I can give you a few chances.”

For a long breathless moment Noctis hangs her head -- it’s impossible to see her eyes, to see what she’s thinking, and Prompto nearly reaches out to her -- 

And then Noctis whispers, “Prompto?”

“Yeah,” and she does make contact then. She seizes Noctis’s hands then. 

Once again Noctis kisses her hands. “That’s the other part of it. Of you and me. You can tell me terrible true things. And I told you something terrible and you just -- you just rolled with it. You didn’t run and you didn’t hate me. I’ve done shitty things to the others -- to Iris and Cindy and Ignis -- and we all got over it and we’re all still working together, we’re all still friends or something, whatever it is we actually are. 

“And you, you just did the exact same thing. You did it even if we’ve only known each other for a very short time. You did it and you, you still have some kind of feelings for me. You have to understand that only makes me feel more strongly about you. I, what I was trying to say all along is I want to be with you. And that’s complicated because I have to lead you and you have to protect me. But, but yeah. Can you keep being that way toward me? Your feelings, and being fair, and -- and not judging. Not judging me in a hurry.”

“I couldn’t do that to you,” Prompto says. It’s most of a promise, the way she whispers it, the way she looks up into the radiant smile on Noctis’s face. “I -- I will do everything I can so I don’t do it to you.”

“And the rest?”

“My feelings for you,” she says. “I have them. I can’t tell you what half of them were. I don’t even know if the words for those feelings exist. But, but yeah. I sort of want to sleep next to you. Hold you through your nightmares. And, and kill every single fucking asshole out there who wants to hurt you. With my bare hands if I have to, but I’ll settle for all the guns in the world.” She laughs, a little. “I’m no angel, not even an angel of vengeance, I don’t have the wings for it. I just want to hurt everyone who wants you dead.”

“Who says I’m any kind of angel, either?” she hears Noctis say. “Maybe I look the part sometimes. But I’ve never been one. Never felt like it. The word doesn’t even make sense to me.”

“Okay,” Prompto says.

And some instinct pushes her up to her own knees, so she’s looking Noctis in the eyes, so she can close the distance between them, soft and easy as she leans in for a kiss.

Brush of quiet laughter past the corner of her mouth, and she grins and kisses Noctis again, and sighs and presses closer when there are hands winding into her hair. 

“You do look so good with this, though,” she hears Noctis say. 

Blink, blink. Prompto looks up, trying to see the flyaway copper-flame of her hair. There’s a schedule to keep, to make sure no one ever connects her with the thought or even the vaguest hint of pale blonde. It’s Ignis who helps her work the coloring cream into her hair; it’s Cindy who helps to touch up her roots, and who also does her eyebrows.

“I’ve almost forgotten what I look like with, with the other color. The one I was born with,” she says.

“You just smell funny after you’ve just had your hair done again.”

She rolls her eyes fondly. “Let me know when you find some kind of hair dye that doesn’t smell like dead and dying things.”

“Ew, Prompto.”

“You started it,” and she playfully pushes Noctis down, flat onto her back onto the bed, and she dives in after her, nipping gently around Noctis’s mouth, tracing the plush curves of her lips.

“I did, I’m sorry, how can I make it up to you,” and there’s something breathless and sweet in those words.

And right before her eyes she sees the flush as it flares up on Noctis’s cheeks -- bright intense red on fair skin, warm where she skims one fingertip towards Noctis’s ear, warm and traveling quickly down to catch in the inked lines of Noctis’s tattoo.

She almost catches at the neckline of Noctis’s nightie, trying to see how far down that flush goes -- she stops herself at the last moment, and feels her own blush heat up, in her throat and in her ears.

“I,” she says.

“I, I don’t know how to be with anyone,” she says. 

Noctis’s eyes, and the slow startled blink of her -- that dissolves into a different kind of smile, something knowing, something like anticipation. “Mmm, kiss me again, you were doing a pretty good job earlier -- ”

Prompto laughs, a little disbelieving, but she leans in anyway and kisses Noctis, and this time it’s easier to open her mouth, to let Noctis in to taste her, and to taste Noctis back -- bump of noses, clack of teeth, and it’s clumsy and it’s good, and she can lean in closer and shiver when Noctis runs her fingers through her hair again, shiver and shake out her breath and an appreciative sigh.

Noctis’s other hand is already working at the buttons of her shirt, quick and deft and practiced, and Prompto’s only grateful for the touch that flutters across her collar bones, the slope of her shoulder, the shape of her ribcage -- and Prompto tries to copy those movements on Noctis, feels out the differences between them.

She stares, she looks her fill, when Noctis laughs a little and shakes off the lace and silk of her nightie.

Noctis only looks waiflike, only looks like a stiff breeze could knock her over: the truth is she’s sturdy, she’s wiry, all long lean muscles cording her arms and her shoulders. Swell of her breasts, softness of the skin around her navel. Lines upon lines in silver and faded pink on her forearms, layers of scarring, and Prompto pulls one of Noctis’s wrists up to her mouth. Kisses over the vivid blue of her veins, the throb of her pulse. 

“Prom.”

Has Noctis ever called her that before?

She lifts her eyes from where she’s looking intently at the lines creasing Noctis’s palm.

Noctis, wide-eyed and beautiful, her mouth still rounded into that soft short sound. “Is that okay? Can I call you that?”

“Do you have a, a name like that, too?” Prompto asks.

“Yeah.” Flicker of nostalgia that crosses her face, like a fleeting fleeing shadow. “I, the ones I loved, like Ravus. Sometimes they’d call me Noct.”

“Noct.” Prompto rolls that sound on her tongue, tastes it thoughtfully on her teeth. “You don’t mind me saying it?”

“You can call me whatever you want, honestly,” is the surprising response. 

That makes her lean down and kiss Noctis again -- and this time she nips at her, still trying so hard to be careful, still learning how Noctis might like to be kissed -- she whispers, “Noct,” and brushes her nose against the outer corner of Noctis’s right eye. “If I come up with something else, I’ll let you know.”

“Yeah.” 

And then she finds herself flat on her back, and Noctis is just inches away, looking down at her with that soft smile. 

“Let me love you,” she hears Noctis say. “And Prom?”

She sort of keens out her answer, half-strangled. “Noct.”

“If I do something and you’re not sure you like it. If you actually don’t like it. Don’t, don’t bear it for my sake. Don’t think about sparing my feelings. Tell me, okay? Tell me so we can, I can stop doing the thing you don’t like. I don’t want to hurt you, I don’t want to frighten you. Okay?”

The words are important, and Prompto nods, and says, “I, I like it when you kiss me, and I don’t know about all the other things, and, and -- I want to learn, too. Not just, not just what I like. What do you like, Noct.”

“You,” is the answer, that takes Prompto’s breath away. “I like you. I want you. I want to make you feel good.”

“Kiss me please?”

But Noctis doesn’t fall upon her as she’d hoped -- not at first, because she rolls to the side and skims off her panties -- Prompto’s only now seeing the black material, not at all a match to the nightie. 

Noctis, bared completely to her. 

So she fumbles to take off the rest of her clothes -- tank top and shorts and her briefs.

She knows she’s blushing, after.

“Never done this before, have you,” Noctis is saying, is asking, gently. 

“Didn’t want anyone to see,” she mutters around the lump in her throat, fear and something else braided together. “Didn’t want the people around me to see.”

“Don’t think about them. Look at me.”

She does. 

Kindness and need, in Noctis’s face, in the lines framing her slight smile. 

“You want me,” Prompto whispers.

The answer is firm and immediate. “More than anything in this world.”

“I, Noct, I don’t -- please show me?”

Noctis shows her how to kiss, how to use her teeth and her tongue and her lips. 

Noctis kisses her ears, her temples, her cheeks, her throat. Kisses her to trace the shapes of her shoulders, the insides of her elbows, the palms of her hands, the tips of her fingers. Kisses over the curves of her ribs, the stretch marks stippling her stomach. 

“I’ll never be done counting your freckles,” she hears Noctis laugh as she’s tracing out spiraling lines over the goosebumps that rise on her breasts. “They look so pretty on you.”

The words are followed by kisses, scattered all over her skin and scattering all her wits, all the thoughts still remaining in her mind -- and she cries out in sharp sweet shock when Noctis takes one of her nipples into her mouth, rolling it onto her tongue.

Dizzy as she is, sensations spinning her around in too many directions, she can still startle and shiver when she feels Noctis’s hands move, pushing her knees apart and flat to the sheets -- she blinks, and she has too many questions, but all she can produce is one single sound: “Noct?”

Soft wet sound as Noctis releases her, and licks her lips, and looks up. “Sorry. Am I going too fast?”

“No, I, I feel good but I don’t know what you’re doing?”

“Oh,” and there’s a soft laugh. “Overload?”

“I, yes?”

“Sorry,” but Noctis is still laughing. 

“I, not interested in apologies,” she tries to say, hoping she’s still making sense. “I’m, it’s good for me, too good, and -- and you?”

Silence, and she levers herself up onto her elbows, and sees the wonder etched into Noctis’s features. 

“Noct,” she says again.

“Better idea,” she hears Noctis say.

Back to their earlier positions, sitting up together and Noctis in the space between her legs, but Noctis plants her feet flat and far apart on the sheets -- Prompto’s hands are being guided around Noctis’s waist, coming to a rest on the cream-pale skin of her inner thighs. 

Noctis is whispering encouragement into the skin of her throat: “Touch me, Prom?”

She skims her fingertips down, sees and feels the shiver that runs through Noctis, and that’s enough to make her go for it, slow and careful, exploring: the startling softness of the patch of dark hair, neatly trimmed, between Noctis’s legs. Smooth skin leading right into the slick wet warmth of her cunt -- and something inside her thrills to the moan that she wrings from Noctis’s mouth.

It’s more than enough to encourage her, to feed the fire of her own need, and she whispers, “Noct.”

Hand, seizing her by the wrist, iron-sweet grip. “Prom, please.”

And that hand guides her, leads her through this entirely new experience, this thing that she understands in her own nerves and in her own skin -- all this to the echoes of Noctis’s voice, rising in sweet soft groans, in fragmented obscenities -- and Prompto presses her mouth to damp dark hair, feeling her own need spike in turn -- 

She strokes a circle around Noctis’s clit -- gets a fervent cry for her troubles -- she finds the rhythm that leaves Noctis breathless and gasping in her arms, her hips twisting this way and that -- her voice unraveling as she says, “Prom, too close -- please, please -- ”

It’s a singular reward, watching and feeling Noctis fall apart by her hands, by her doing.

And she wants to do it again to her -- wants to experience it for herself -- 

Slowly, carefully, she strokes Noctis down from the high of her climax, and holds her close. Kisses her throat and the back of her neck and her shoulder -- 

She’s not at all prepared when Noctis turns around and grins. “Your turn.”


	10. Chapter 10

The corridors in their twisting and turning ways aren’t new to her, not any more -- the carpets beneath and the lighting fixtures hanging from the walls. Doors and doors and doors lined up in nearly endless ranks, neatly spaced, neatly serried, marching away as far as she can see -- or at least until she spots a corner, an intersection, a staircase, a bank of elevators. The arches over her head, leaving parts of the ceiling darker than the shadow that she casts.

Her shadow -- now that’s new, in its little way, or at least it’s new in the sense of she’s wearing new clothes, and so the outlines of that shadow aren’t the same. 

Haven’t been the same, not since the day she arrived in that half-assed shambles of a suit.

She lets herself smirk, just a little, because there are still too many eyes following her through the corridors of this Citadel, this endangered place in this burning city, but at least they’re not following her because they’re staring at her clothes.

Now she looks like most everyone else in the Lucis Caelum ranks, at least when it comes to the sweep of the coat that’s hanging off her shoulders, anchored on nothing more than the jutting points of her own skin and bones, on the sting that clings to her nerves. The coat, double-breasted and falling right to her knees, is the focus and not -- not the other things, other things like the bare hairline’s-edge of the bruise that’s still darkening on her collar bone. The marks of teeth and tongue in the center of that purpling mark that she can still feel, vividly real, vivid pain and pleasure and the lingering echoes of possessive laughter -- her own, and Noctis’s.

The straight high boundary of her neckline that snugs up against the hollow of her throat, that reaches across her chest from shoulder to shoulder. Neckline on a scarlet top, sleeveless, like the very first outfit that Iris had put together for her and that Gladio had passed on: but this one has no need for any embellishments, other than the rich water-grain pattern embossed into the shimmering silk, loose and floating just against her skin, only drifting into actual contact when she moves too suddenly.

Creak of her knee-high boots as she walks, longer and longer strides now that she’s mostly succeeded at waking herself up from a fresh parade of those restless marching hours, and from time to time, to distract from the sharp edges sawing down her nerves, she beats out the rhythm for her own steps against the leather of her trousers, and the chain winding from her pocket to one of her belt loops. Impact of her gloves against her hip, against her leg, covered-up palm and wrist and bare fingertips. 

Prompto catches an elevator just as its doors are opening and then closing on the lack of passengers, and she straightens the loose-dangling sleeves of her coat where they drape against her arms. Black and silver cord in thin braids decorating the epaulettes, the cuffs, and the standing edges of the coat’s collar. Four diagonal lines in the front of that collar, to match the four crosses on the epaulettes and the four rings marching up from the cuffs. Silver, too, are the buttons on the front of the coat, two lines down her chest and nearly to her knees, framing the center closure and the hidden hook-and-eye clasps. 

Two men get on the elevator on the next floor, and they’re wearing the same coat she is, only with three lines on the collar and on the sleeves. They’re all buttoned up at wrists and throat -- and they nod to her, respectfully, and she nods back, and even offers a small smile in return.

And then she’s sticking her hands in her pockets, she’s trying to whistle through her teeth, and she can feel the shapes of the weapons she’s carrying, the lengths of the belts she’s wearing, mostly concealed by the swing of the coat. Holster at her right hip for her favorite pistol, and the slots in one belt for a handful of extra magazines.

Odd to look at her own hazy reflection in the mirror-finish of the cabin and not see another matte-black muzzle sticking up over her shoulder, but there’s something else that she’s got to do and the rifle she’s stolen from the Izunia ranks isn’t part of it, not tonight --

Down, down into the lower levels of the Citadel, and she’s one of the first to get off and -- it’s strange to look out the windows, strange to look out into the smoke-stained night, the fire-choked glare on the horizon, and be able to see moving shadows across the streets and on rooftops, and it’s not the first time she feels the itch to draw her pistol and -- maybe not cock it, not quite yet. Just hold on to it, and be ready for anything --

But she turns the corner and away from the windows, and all the doors are open, and now she has to duck and dance around all the other people moving in and out of various rooms, and she knows that the door she’s heading to is marked just at eye-level with a strip of wide neon-green tape, and she breathes through her mouth so she doesn’t sneeze in the close and musty air, and there, there in the corner of the room among the moving shadows of men and women is the still-dwindling heap of mattresses.

And there’s a girl there in a tattered white suit jacket, in dust-stained trousers. Dark blue rubber shoes that don’t match her eyes, like bruise-colored shadows against her pale skin and her lack of socks, and Prompto hurries to grab the other end of the mattress that she’s trying to pull from the pile: “Want some help?”

“Are you supposed to be here? Are you allowed to lift things now?” But that might be concern in her voice, in Lunafreya’s voice, rising like the dull red spots in her cheeks. 

“I’ll answer those questions if you do, too,” Prompto says, and after these past few nights she now knows how to hold on to a mattress so she can pick it up and not cramp out her hands or her elbows or her shoulders. Kind, kind, she has to remember to be kind, when she adds, as gently as she can manage given the weight they’re both carrying: “Ignis said it was okay for you to be doing this?”

Lopsided smile, in response. “I just told him what Noctis told me. What she might have told you, if you had time to talk, I guess?”

Prompto doesn’t blush, just grins as she steps past a pair of women carrying another, larger, mattress. “All hands on deck.”

“Maybe he hopes I’d do better, just, sitting somewhere and helping sort the guns and the magazines and the other things, but, but maybe I got bored and now I’m here.”

“I’d rather do that, any day,” Prompto mutters, only mostly under her breath, and she means every word, she thinks. 

Especially now, when every movement and every step seems to pull on the skin stretched taut on the upper reaches of her back, shoulder to shoulder in a straight line that still burns, but not in a way that makes her weep with pain. Not in a way that makes her want to buckle down to her knees -- it’s a pricking, it’s a diminishing burn, that fades and then leaps back to her awareness at the strangest times.

Like right now, where she’s turning a tight corner towards one of the other open doors and she draws in a sharp breath when the pain seems to travel in a rapid straight line from her left shoulder to the back of her head, to the back of her right ear, sudden and shocking and then gone just as soon as it came.

“Prompto,” she hears Lunafreya say.

“I just got here, I’ll keep working,” she says, in response, and now she can smile and now she can keep going, and she means every word. 

Because along with each fresh twinge of pain that shudders in her skin comes the bright peak of euphoria. Comes the memory of choosing. Every flash of pain in this very moment is a choice, is a choice she’d made, a choice she’s still making. Flash of pain that fades into a high that’s entirely of her own making.

“Then I’m going to keep working too.”

“This way, ladies,” one of the women who normally walks along in the black-suited wake of Crowe calls. “We’ll need a couple more in the corners.”

“Copy that,” Prompto says, and she turns sharply on her heel, so she’s the one backing towards the room to which the other woman is pointing. 

“Careful,” she hears Lunafreya say, cautioning.

“You too,” she says, and between them the mattress isn’t heavy at all; it’s only a stained and awkward bulk, and they stop-and-start to dodge the men hurrying past with oversized duffel bags hanging from their hands. 

Once they get into the room the woman who had called out to them steps forward to help, and together they prop the mattress up on its shorter end, so it’s mostly leaning against a window. The width of it leaves just a sliver of view on either side, and the windows are constructed in thin vertical panels that each swing open on its own set of hinges, wide enough to let the muzzle of a rifle through. 

Rope to lash and knot the mattress into place against the frame of the window, and the woman nods her thanks. 

“When we finish with this one, where’s the next?” Prompto asks, when they’ve brought in the second mattress, only a little less bulky than the first.

“One floor down,” the woman says.

“Thanks.”

It’s strange to be the person who knows where they need to go, when Prompto can vividly remember the nights she’s spent stumbling and lost from floor to floor, when she still feels like she needs to be shepherded down one corridor or another: but she can also still remember the crimson flaring in Lunafreya’s cheeks, when it had been burning in her own. She can sympathize with the way Lunafreya stops and starts as they trace the twisting ways of the Citadel, the layout of each floor, the locations of places like -- armories and briefing rooms. Repurposed spaces.

And every time she tries to reorient herself, Prompto waits, patiently, hands in her pockets.

She knows about the confusion that seems to shadow Lunafreya’s every expression.

“Sorry.”

They’re in one of the smaller eating areas, no more than ten floors up from the main entrance into the Citadel, and there are worn-out whispers next to the table that’s been set up with the coffee things, men and women stripped down to their lightest and innermost shirts. Hands and arms stained with rust, faces streaked with oil and grime; and even their coats, set aside in an ungainly pile, stink of cobwebs.

The armor detail, Prompto thinks, and she wonders where Cindy is.

But she forgets about iron bars and heavy doors when Lunafreya slumps over in the corner, where they’re sitting side-by-side on miraculously mostly clean tile and carpet. 

“What?” she asks, as gentle as she can try for.

“Sorry.”

“You keep saying that and I don’t know why you keep saying it. I mean, why are you apologizing to me? You didn’t do anything.”

“I’m not tired,” she hears Lunafreya say. “I mean, I’m not falling-down tired. I’ve been spending all my hours walking around and trying to remember some things -- and trying to forget a great many others. I can’t sleep for trying, and I’ve even taken those pills Mother still has, and I’m still waking up at all the wrong hours and so I’m helping out, but I can’t even remember half the rooms I’ve walked into. That last place, the one where we were putting up the mattresses, I though that used to be an office of some kind, and -- where did all the desks go? All the files?”

She shakes her head. “I never knew it as an office. It’s been empty the whole time I’ve been here -- and that’s not a lot of time, so I don’t know that there was ever anything else in it. Maybe they moved the files somewhere safer.”

“For a given value of safer. This is Insomnia. There’s no such thing as truly safe, not here.”

“Yeah, goes without saying.” She cracks open a bottle of water and passes it over. “What about this room? Do you know it, or anything about it?”

She thinks that might be some kind of sadness, something deeper than just tears, in Lunafreya’s eyes. “I recognize that painting,” and she points to the single golden frame, and the woman in the gray dress and the golden bands and chains decorating her white-feathered wing -- she only has one of those that Prompto can see. “And, you know, I like the idea that she’s watching over the people who might eat in here. Who might have conversations in here. I think she used to watch over tables and desks and the people who sat at them, because this room was like a classroom -- look, over there in the other corner. The frame there?”

Prompto squints -- and nods at the leg on the frame, twisted all out of hope of mending, so there’s no way it’ll be able to stand on its own now. “Yeah.”

“It used to hold a whiteboard. We’d doodle in the corners when we could, but most of the time the entire board was full of things like -- diagrams.”

“Right. For lessons? Tactics? Strategy and shit?”

“Like talking to new recruits,” she hears Lunafreya say. 

“Oh.” 

Footsteps, approaching: burn-scars dotting the woman’s hands. Mismatched vacuum flasks, the taller one in scratched-up green and the shorter one in red and blue stripes. “Soup?”

“Please,” Prompto says, and she opens the shorter flask carefully, and pours out a cloudy-brown liquid, flecked with wilted green. “Drink this,” and she passes the little cup to Lunafreya.

“Thanks.”

The woman grunts, and moves on.

She’s finally drinking a little soup for herself -- bland on the tongue, gritty in the throat, but not in a way that makes her choke, not in a way that’s hard to swallow -- when another voice rings out in the corridor: “Prompto!”

“Someone’s calling you,” Lunafreya says, still sitting quiet and compact next to her.

And the next thing she knows, Iris is standing over her. Worry in the straight line of her eyebrows, in the twist of her mouth, in her cocked hip. “Third night running, Prompto, really?”

“You were there,” she says, and shrugs, and the movement brings fresh prickles of irritation along her skin, and she winces.

So does Iris. “I was. I still don’t agree. But come on. With all the things you’ve been doing I’ve got to check on your back. We’ll be lucky if I won’t have to redo any of the letters.”

“I’ve been caring for it like you said.”

“Except for the part where you’ve been moving mattresses when I told you, loudly, so everyone else around us could hear, that you’d have to do something else.” Words like a sigh, and hands that lift her swiftly to her feet. 

“Ow,” she says, then, when she wobbles into the wall as she tries to regain her balance. “Fuck.”

“Here,” and there are arms sliding around her waist, holding her steady, and she reaches out for Lunafreya’s shoulder and breathes past the sparking pain in her head, in her skin, one and two and then she can push the other girl away, gently. 

She remembers to cap the vacuum flask -- and it’s taken away from her anyway -- and then she’s walking again, this time to follow in Iris’s wake.

In the elevator, she hears Lunafreya clear her throat. Sees her turn towards Iris. “I’ve thought about it and -- would you recommend something like vines, like flowers, here?”

Prompto watches her trace along the tendon that leads to the palm of her hand. 

Scrape of Iris’s teeth along the top of her thumb. Thoughtful tilt of her eyebrows. “Do you want just patches of color blending together, or were you thinking like outlines filled in with color?”

“The latter,” she hears Lunafreya say, “but it might be better if I simply showed you the design. I’ve been sketching it out.”

“That works,” is the response.

Back in familiar corridors: Iris’s suite of rooms, twice as big as Cindy’s or Ignis’s, is two floors above Prompto’s, and it’s even easier to remember, because she’s been coming and going this way over the past three or four nights, feeling every step, every impact of her feet against the carpet. Every swing of her arms. Every breath she takes.

Past one door painted in red and then through another, when Iris beckons her through. The golden doorknob is the distinguishing feature.

Prompto shrugs off her coat and hangs it up, and she pulls her shirt away, too, and Iris is chivvying her over to a spare and compact black-metal frame and all of its attached cushions and arms and protrusions, and she’s been here before, so it’s easy to sit, facing away from everyone else in the room. Forehead against the cool leather covering the U-shaped cushion just at her eye level. She’s been wearing a strapless bra for the past few days, so there’s nothing else to move or adjust as she hears Iris settle behind her, as she feels the touch of hands covered in the too-smooth texture of what she now knows is plastic wrap. 

She doesn’t flinch any more, because she’s learned to trust Iris, and not just because of the touch of a hand and of the needles attached to a tattoo machine. 

She knows the letters inked into her skin, now, the words running together into most of a single long line stretching from shoulder to shoulder.

Birds: everyone else wearing the four lines and four rings on their coats also wears birds, or things related to birds, in their skin. Ignis’s feather, Cindy’s flock. Iris’s back is a monochrome garden, a riot of flowers in dots and shades and hatching -- and an owl, wise-eyed, peering out at the world from between her shoulder blades.

And of course she knows the shapes and the lines and the textures of Noctis’s bird of prey: the cruelly hooked beak and the wide wide raptor eyes. Talons outstretched as though to capture, as though to tear, claw-tips hooked open and bare on Noctis’s stomach.

Birds for the others and so she’s chosen to follow their collective lead, since she’s with them, since she follows all of them -- but it’s not the image of a bird she wears, nor its wings. Instead of a portrait, instead of the curves of a wing, instead of capturing furious flight, she’s chosen the words of a children’s skipping game, the words of a song about marauding birds.

One for sorrow  
Two for mirth  
Three for a funeral  
Four for a birth  
Five for heaven  
Six for hell  
Seven for the devil her own self

And now she can hear Lunafreya reading the words, half-chanting, and the melody she uses is a little different from the one she’s heard from Noctis and from Cindy.

The melody is closer to something that she’s heard Ignis hum, in the depths of the night when they’re standing in adjacent booths in a shooting range. Hum that’s broken and obscured when they address their paper targets, lost in the roar of gunfire -- hum that catches her attention in the quiet moments of oil and soft rag and gray powder on stiff-bristled brushes. 

After Lunafreya’s done with reading her words, she continues. “Why is the last line different? We say, seven birds, seven for the devil, and the devil is -- his own self. But, Prompto, maybe you knew the devil was a woman, maybe when you were a child?”

“You can talk if you like, you haven’t done anything too drastic to the lines yet,” she hears Iris add.

So she lifts her head. Turns in the general direction of Lunafreya’s voice. “Ignis told you who I was.”

Steps moving closer. Warmth near her elbow. “He didn’t go into the details.” Quiet words. “He said you might not want to talk about it.”

“He’s right, I don’t,” she says. “I can’t. Partly since I don’t want to add to your nightmares.”

“That’s kind of you.”

She has to purse her lips because she can’t shake her head, and can’t shrug. “And I never heard that song before I came here. So why’d I change the words? Pretty simple,” and she smiles, a little. “I changed it because I want to think of better devils. Better in the sense of, they’re with me, and not against me. I’m on their side. Devils in black and gold and blue.” 

Small movement of her own hand, motioning to her own eyes. 

“Black and gold and blue.” Echo of her words in Lunafreya’s voice. “Then you’re talking about the Lucis Caelums. One of them? Both of them?”

“All of them -- all of us. And Aulea and Noctis first and foremost.”

“Oh. That does make sense. You chose to wear it all in one line?”

“Iris said she could do it,” Prompto mutters. “And I didn’t want anything too big, because I’ve never had a tattoo before. Maybe if we survive, if we all keep surviving, I can think about something else.”

“You didn’t have to get this one anyway.” Only a touch of a sharp edge in Iris’s words. “I mean, you could have gotten practically anything else as long as I could understand the design.”

She grins, and tilts her head from side to side because she can’t shrug right now. “Like I said, I wanted to fit in with you guys.”

“I said you didn’t have to, you already did. But it’s kind of too late for me to insist on it when I’m going over your lines already, yeah?”

So Prompto laughs and grits her teeth against the too-high whine, the first startling impact of ink and needles against her skin.

Warmth around her hand. She opens her eyes -- when had she closed them? -- and glances at Lunafreya. “Does this help?”

“Yeah,” Prompto murmurs back. And: “You want a tat on your wrist? How are you going to -- do things?”

“Very carefully,” she hears Lunafreya say. “And I want something small, anyway, so maybe it won’t have to hurt so much.”

“Is it going to be your first one?”

“Not at all,” is the reply. 

“I wouldn’t let her move her head if I were you, Luna. Not right now. Give me a minute here.” Iris, quiet, maybe concentrating.

“Don’t move, Prompto. I’ll tell you all about it,” she hears Lunafreya say. 

“Yeah, I’m listening,” and she taps Lunafreya’s wrist with her thumb. “Where is it?”

She watches as that hand, still smudged with soot and the lingering strands of filmy, fuzzy web-lines, leaves a dark streak against the opening of the right trouser pocket. “Here.”

“Oh. Like, you’ve got a band on or something?”

The laugh that she hears is too small, and also too proud. “It’s actually a lot more than just a band. It’s my entire leg.”

And Prompto draws in a startled breath when Lunafreya leans over to roll up the cuff on her right leg. 

The dense tracery of lines inked into that pale skin reminds her of, of something like long fine vines cascading down from the branches of a tree. Leaves and flower-shapes in long clusters, and each vine ending in a loose spiral, from which hangs the delicate shape of a crescent moon.

“I never even thought,” she begins, and she runs her eyes upwards, imagines the leaves and petals all over. The bare space between Lunafreya’s ankle and the ends of the tattoo: it’s maybe four fingers wide. 

She doesn’t know what else to say, except: “Lunafreya. Your entire leg? How?”

“Many hours -- I lost count after the first day, I think?”

“Something like that would take weeks.” Matter-of-fact tone in Iris’s voice. “At least that. Call it two months.”

“It was closer to three. I asked for it to be done in segments, so I could heal. Yours took longer,” she hears Lunafreya say.

“Yes and no,” she hears Iris say. “We’ll split the difference. Six weeks. I was adrenaline-rushing.”

And she waves her hand, carefully, in the direction of Lunafreya. Manages to snag her sleeve between two fingers. 

Blink. Lunafreya’s head, tilting in her direction. “Yes, Prompto?”

“Can I ask you why you wanted to do that?”

“How come you never asked me about mine?” Iris’s voice rising from behind her, the mild mockery and laughter in her words somehow louder, stronger -- maybe it’s the tattoo machine, Prompto thinks, the steady whine of it, that no longer leaves her feeling like she might be flying apart at the seams. “Harsh.”

She breathes, and breathes, and it’s easy, easy to let the slivers of fleeting pain pass through her. Pass her by. Needles driving into and out of her: needles tracing out the words that she’d chosen, the words that she can say easily and not lose her breath, fighting off her own screams, her own sobs.

This is her choice. This is her wish. This is not -- her left hand trapped in a cuff. This is not a room that only looks comfortable, a room that’s watching her every movement.

There are other people in this room with her and she knows at least one of them well enough to speak with a little less respect, and so she says, “I never asked because I thought I could guess what was going on.”

Not the first time she’s been here, after all. Not the first time in close quarters with Iris, and the nights of guard duty are still weighing heavily upon them in the here and now. The duty of keeping Noctis safe within these walls. 

She’s seen the magnificent piece of tones and shadows and heavy outlines that almost covers the entirety of Iris’s back -- true, she’s never had the chance to see the whole thing in its entirety, but she’s seen it in flashes, in isolated bits and pieces. Pulling on a jacket or taking it off, to reveal the neat show-off shapes cut out of a shirt. Unfastening the straps of a ballistic vest from over a tank top. Changing into a fresh pair of trousers or a less-creased skirt, or exchanging separate pieces for a dress or a jumpsuit -- she’s seen petals and leaves, the eyes of the owl in its nearly perfect camouflage, and so she knows that Iris’s tattoos extend from the back of her neck on down, all the way past the small of her back.

“Really? You guessed?” Iris says, now.

“I mean, I’m pretty sure you’re going to tell me I’ve got parts of it wrong. Maybe even all of it. But after I started realizing that your piece was, was all over your skin, all over your back, I started thinking. Maybe you liked the tattoo artist? Maybe you started with just the one flower and then you started adding on and adding on, and it became an entire fucking garden without you even thinking about it that way to begin with. Or maybe it had something to do with your name, and your brother’s. Like maybe you thought there was a theme already going in there somewhere and you just decided to go all in.”

The tattoo machine scrapes her shoulder blade and she draws a deep startled breath, and doesn’t cry out.

“Sorry. I had to make sure I got that line firmed up.”

Fingers around Prompto’s hand, wrapping around her carefully, and she squeezes back, and hears the scrape of chair legs against the floor, the settling of a slight weight, and Lunafreya breathing quiet and steady next to her, so she tries to match that serene pace and the needles recede from her again, little by little.

“Am I right?” she asks, when she thinks she can trust her voice again.

“Sort of,” is the quiet laugh of a response. “By which I mean, you came up with three different reasons and one of them was right.”

“Fair enough,” and it hurts a little to laugh. “Which one was it? Which one was the right one?”

“The last one,” she hears Iris say, pause in the whine of ink and needles. “I mean, I started with bits of gladiolus. There’s only one iris on my back and I never asked for it; it was something the tattoo artist apologized for, and I was angry at them for a while, and I almost asked them to cover it up and then someone saw it, you know?”

“Someone?” Lunafreya’s voice. 

“Dad.” 

Prompto blinks, and she’d tilt her head to pay better attention, if she could move. She’d listen more closely. Neither Iris nor Gladio talk about their mother at all, and maybe she understands the whole thing about the Lucis Caelums needing to have some kind of secret weapon, some kind of secret general. Hell, even the very _knowledge_ of Ceres Amicitia’s name’s sort of like a proof of belonging: like if you know that name and you won’t say it out loud, maybe you’re really a part of the ranks.

At least, that’s what she thinks.

Ceres’s husband, though, Iris’s father and Gladio’s -- she wracks her brains, and tries to remember the name that she’s heard, tries to remember who told her -- right, it was Noctis -- now she just has to remember the actual name and she’s golden -- 

Fortunately for her, Lunafreya says the name out loud. “Clarus? Iris, forgive me, I’m so thoughtless. I haven’t even remembered him at all. I haven’t even asked after him. Please tell me, how is he?”

Sigh, long and loud. 

And Prompto can’t help but wonder what keeps Iris’s hands so steady. Wonder how Iris can keep working a tattoo machine at this point, when her words now sound so small and uncertain: “He’s, well, he is,” she hears Iris say. “Some days are better. Some days are worse.”

“I don’t understand. Is he suffering from complications? Are there any problems with -- secondary conditions? His mental health?”

“I keep forgetting the -- the thing in your family,” is Iris’s reply to the questions. “The medical thing you and your mom have going on.”

“I’ve been trying to understand what Mother knows.” Lunafreya’s hand slips away, then. “She says it would make more sense if I tried to focus on one thing, but -- but there’s always so much more to learn. You remember when I was just trying to be like some kind of paramedic? I think I’ve gone so much further, and it’s good to know, but I’m also confused most of the time. Like I don’t know how to put everything together. It’s a puzzle, and it’s all in pieces, and I can’t see the big picture, so I can’t make sense of the little bits.”

“Yeah, I know how you feel: there’s Noctis, and then there’s all the bits and pieces of her, and those don’t add up to the big picture. She’s an entire list of subjects in and of herself. Right, Prompto?”

“And aggravating half the time, too,” she says, knowing she sounds fond. Knowing she sounds devoted. “If you can even keep up with her in the first place.”

“Yeah, you know she’s just going easy on you now because you’re new -- when you start feeling like you might actually strangle her with your bare hands, we’ll talk about how to do it and why we’re going to fail.”

She laughs, softly. “Sounds good.”

The tattoo machine goes quiet, suddenly, and the weight of Iris’s plastic-wrapped hands lifts from her shoulders, and Prompto has to think about taking a breath that isn’t braced against impact.

“Hold still.” Iris’s feet on the move, firm and decisive steps.

She winces away from the sharply medicinal stink of balm. A protective coating of oil and warming agents and other things, even application smoothed into the upper edges of her back, and the cream is pressed more deeply into her skin by a fresh layer of the same plastic film that Iris uses to shield her hands. 

“That should do it, Prompto, that should be the last one,” she hears Iris say. “Let’s hope for -- quiet nights. For the time you need to heal. I just hope nothing happens and we have to, like, run and do shit, because if something happens to you now and you get hurt or hit or what -- that tat’s going to get fucked up, too.”

“Yeah,” she says, and she slowly, carefully, straightens up from where she’s been braced forward into the chair. “And -- you wanna finish what you were talking about?”

“What? Oh, this,” and she watches Iris tap her own shoulder. “Where was I?”

“You said that Clarus saw your initial markings.” Lunafreya, again. Prompto can see her as she leans forward, just a little. “He could hardly have complained, could he?”

“Yeah, no. We’ve all got our own ink: mom and dad and Gladio and me. And dad, he was happy with what I was doing, he didn’t have any problems with me starting up my own collection. He had suggestions and all that -- but I wasn’t really listening to them. I was thinking about my own designs. Skulls, stuff like that. Lucis Caelum things, you get me? I mean. That was the plan. 

“But then he took one of his turns for the worse. This was way before you arrived, okay, not something recent at all,” and Prompto nods, hopes she looks as grave as Iris sounds now. “Gladio stayed with him, in mom’s place, in mine. Gladio took care of him, and sent us updates, and sometimes the updates were really good but most of the updates were not. And Noctis and I, we were caught up in tons and tons of the shit that we had to deal with -- we weren’t exactly the best people to be around -- and I was running scared, a lot. Scared because I didn’t know what I was going to come home to. Scared because I didn’t want to know what mom would be like, if we came home to, to -- ” 

“To a bad ending,” Prompto mutters, when Iris falters.

Quiet ragged laugh in response. “That’s a really nice way of putting it. Yeah. To a bad ending. I needed some kind of coping mechanism, you know? And I’d already started with the things on my back by then. Eventually I came up with. Well, with what I’m wearing now.

“The stuff I’ve got -- it’s all the flowers my dad likes. You’ve seen the moonflowers, right, or -- no, wait, Prompto, you wouldn’t have been allowed to go up to the gardens yet. So, but you’ve heard of them?”

“I’ve seen them,” Prompto hears Lunafreya say. “I had heard of them, and then I got the chance to see them last night, and I was surprised they were doing so well.”

So she adds, “Noctis told me about them, yeah.”

“Yeah. They’re one of dad’s favorite flowers, and they’re the only ones that really took to this place. To the garden. I mean, we were all surprised when we saw that they were doing so well, since they normally do better in southern weather. But here, the ones we do have are almost at the point of choking out most everything else.” 

She can just see the motion of Iris’s hand, sweeping upwards, and she remembers Noctis storming up to that garden, some nights.

“Everything else on my back can’t or won’t grow here. Problems with the temperatures, he says, problems with the weather, problems with everything basically. So what else is new. But the moonflowers are the exception, and once I got started with them I didn’t want to stop any more, and so -- here we are.”

“Here we are,” she hears Lunafreya say. 

“You wanna show me your idea now?” And Iris is still moving around: she’s moving the chair and the bottles of ink and the tattoo machine back to their right places.

Prompto can only think about helping, and can’t really do anything for herself, since she’s still shaking with the leftover pain, the little bits and pieces of adrenaline still in her blood and still in her thoughts.

But she can follow the movements of Lunafreya as she takes the pen and paper that Iris offers. As she props the sheet on her knee and sketches, quickly, sharp short strokes to shape a stalk and the spray of flowers. Cross-hatched petals. “I can’t put too much detail into this, since it will be a small thing,” she hears Lunafreya say.

“Might as well think about that being the actual-sized thing, yeah,” is Iris’s response. “That a real flower or something?”

“It’s like the ones on my leg. Related to them. Like they’re in the same family.”

Edge of tears on the trailing end of that word, and Prompto twitches, and reaches out to catch Lunafreya’s free hand in her own. 

“That’s what all of this has been for anyway.”

Iris, too, wears sympathy on her shoulders. “Okay. I think I might be seeing what you mean. But, but we can’t start now, and you know that. This is the worst time to start a tat, or finish it, considering -- there’s still so much to do, having to lock this place down, having to make sure we’ll have guns and bullets and armor to go around -- ”

“You can’t be imagining that attack is coming soon,” she hears Lunafreya say.

Prompto can’t help but shake her head, and sigh. Can’t help but mutter. “It’s not our timetable. It’s theirs. It’s his.”

“His. Ardyn Izunia’s.”

“You had to say it,” she hears Iris say. “But yeah you should. Say the name, I mean. He’s not a fucking demon or boogeyman or whatever. He’s just one man and he’s just got a name. And I’d give a lot to be the person who gets to put that bullet through his fucking head, but -- we all know who’s got dibs.”

“Is it you, Prompto?”

She wants to be.

Oh, how she wants.

But she clenches her fists and shakes her head, and catches the surprise in Lunafreya’s eyes. “No. I’d be a long way down the line. I don’t care what Noctis says. What Aulea says. They’ve got the shot. And I’ll do what I can to give them that shot.”

“As long as you don’t do anything too stupid,” she hears Iris say. 

She sighs, a little. “And what would you call me stealing that necklace?”

Dark low laughter. “I have no idea. Although I’m happy you did it, and I’m still not happy I couldn’t come along.”

“It was a nightmare,” is all she says. “I’m still having nightmares about it.”

The shiver that runs down her spine has nothing to do with the words like healing wounds in her skin.


	11. Chapter 11

High thin ragged whistle of the wind in her ears, and she doesn’t really have the words to describe the sound that she makes. It’s annoying and it’s small and she maybe sounds afraid, which is not a good thing when she’s sharing the radio frequencies with Noctis and Ignis and Lunafreya, and she grits her teeth until her jaw muscles cramp sharply and she blows out a hard breath, and pulls the brim of her black hat down, down, so it’s covering her eyebrows and the tops of her ears and the nape of her neck.

“It’s all right.” Lunafreya’s voice, kind, not exactly soothing with the wary edge in it. “And you must forgive me.”

“What’d you do to me,” she mutters back, and she shakes her hands to try and get the blood flowing again, try to work the sharp twinges out before she can grab the sniper rifle on its bipod, before she can put her eye to the scope once again. Before she can key the mic on and continue. “You’re down there and I’m up here.”

And what she sees, through her own eyes and through the scope: an intersection of dark and closed and shuttered store-fronts. Houses huddling together as if they, too, could feel afraid. Not a light burns in any window that she can see, and she can’t trust that, in the way that she can’t trust anything in this world. Sky overhead in which the wisp of smoke is nearly as common and heavy and thick as the wisps of cloud that race over the cold and distant face of the faraway moon -- and not even the full coin-light of it can drive her fears away. Not even the shape of it can calm her nerves.

She doesn’t see any of the others, which is the point, a few blocks outside of the Stormland neighborhoods in their last sullen straggling sprawl, and she’s glad she can’t see them because that means they’re mostly under cover, that means they’re temporarily safe, and she’s the sentinel, she’s their eyes from her rooftop perch, watching the world and waiting for its horrors to come, so she can warn them, so she can protect them.

But she also wishes she could see them, because nearly dead ahead by the angle of her scope and the cold moonlight, she can see the edges of the city, and she can almost see the place where she had once been held. Or the ghosts of its buildings, its fences, its outposts. The bones of the men and women who’d been part of the ranks at that time. Razed in the wake of her escape, razed and torn down by the same instigating madman who’s now trying to torch the entirety of Insomnia, and the others have tried to reassure her that the Izunias have made no move to reclaim that gutted bleak black territory. Not the Izunias, and not any other family that they know of, not in the entirety of Insomnia, in its gasping maimed nights.

She can only hear their words, and she can’t take their kindness. Can’t accept it in any way, no matter how gently they mean it.

She can’t trust anyone or anything that’s been tainted by the Izunias and -- and that still and sometimes extends to herself, where she can’t bear to look at the strands of blonde that stray through her styled hair, where she can’t bear to look at the handcuff-scars lingering stubborn and hateful around her left wrist.

Lunafreya is calling her name: “Prompto.”

And she blinks the angry tears away -- soundlessly, this time, fighting to keep her breaths controlled and steady so they don’t rise into the jagged wrench of sobs, so the others don’t catch on. “Yeah.”

“You are back with us. I’ve been trying to talk to you.”

“Sorry. I was -- trying to watch everything.”

“Thank you. And -- I wanted to apologize because I heard you, I heard the noise you made, and I was grateful that you made it, so that I didn’t have to.”

“What,” she says. “Why do you think that you have to apologize for that?”

“You don’t like being used,” is the quiet answer.

“Oh.”

“And we’re grateful for what you’re doing for us now, Prompto, so: thank you.” Different voice, similar accent. Ignis, and she remembers the black of his coat and everything else he’s wearing beneath. Remembers the strange concealment of his face because he’s wearing a balaclava, tonight, and she remembers her own mad escape and the gibbering nervousness of stealing that one item for herself, a long time ago. 

Remembers running with him on a storm-torn night, with something unspeakably precious in her hands, and his eyes watching the world all around her, keen and kind. 

“For helping us stay alive.”

“Especially because tonight I might just be leading all of you into -- shit,” and that voice is Noctis’s. Hard sharp lilt of her, and Prompto breathes in that fierce sound, drinks it in, like water to slake her parched throat and parched heart. “I wish I could have talked us all out of this.”

“Fair is fair,” but Ignis sounds unhappy, too, in his own way. The roll of his consonants and the downward tone of his words.

Prompto thinks she’d hear the angry click of his joints, his jaw and his knuckles, if he were anywhere near her -- just as she thinks she’d see nothing but storm-clouds on Noctis’s forehead.

She’s seen Lunafreya troubled and worried and lost in terrible thoughts, but what does she look like when she’s angry, Prompto wonders.

“At least you convinced him to call on you just this once.” Tension, turning Lunafreya’s speech quiet and choppy. “One favor to pay for all.”

“Unless we wind up owing him our lives, and then it’s going to be an unholy mess, and only fuck knows how he’s going to call that one in.” Gritting, guttural, like Noctis might be grinding her teeth. “I mean. This is Insomnia. Everyone’s the enemy, and the way he works, he’s got nearly as many enemies as I do.” Breath, sharp and spiky. “Plus I don’t even want to think about explaining this whole stupid mad thing to everyone.”

“Which begs the question: how did you explain this night at all?”

“Well they understood the idea of one favor to pay him back for everything else. I mean, we all owe favors like that. We’re all owed favors like that. I think.”

“Hardly reassuring,” but Ignis only sounds mildly amused.

She’s not reassured, herself: maybe it’s the knowledge of that, that currency of favors, that bothers her, and only a little because she’s not the one who’s owed favors. 

She owes, and she has far too many debts.

Sometimes every day feels like a fresh new debt to owe.

Again she grinds her teeth in sorrow, in rage.

Distraction: she needs a distraction, or perhaps she needs to get back to the task at hand, and so. 

Back to these hours, too bright for comfort, too exposed -- and when she sweeps the night-shrouded, moon-sullen world once again, she has to draw in a sharp breath, as good as a warning. “Guys.” Swallow, to get rid of the graveled edge on her words. “Movement heading towards you, Ignis.”

Some of the clicks she can hear, in response, are easy to understand. Weapons ready. The sound of unfolding, as he puts his safety glasses on over his usual spectacles. 

The rest of the sounds she can hear from his end are quieter, more muffled, and she doesn’t know what to make of those. “Thank you. Can you give me more details?”

“They’re under cover, same as you,” she says, squinting for only a moment through the scope. “I can only see the edges of their movement.”

“So what else is new? I don’t disapprove of you, mind. I’m weary of our enemies’ tactics.”

“If they don’t learn anything, it just means we can try to be better at -- at finishing them off,” she hears Noctis say, quietly, firmly. 

“ _Try_ being the operative word. Keep me informed, please.”

“Copy, Ignis,” she says, and she sweeps again. Just because she knows one source of danger, doesn’t mean she can spot or even predict the rest -- and the others are relying on her for precisely that.

“I have movement in my sector,” Lunafreya says, next. “But why are they wearing such odd colors? Electric blue? That will not help them to hide.”

It’s an unexpected thing, too, to hear Noctis’s quiet scoff in response. “That’s because they don’t see the point in hiding. If you link up with them, Lunafreya, the pass-phrase is _Hearth and home_ \-- if they spit on the ground -- run with them, they’re Nyx’s people.”

“And if they try to -- salute? If they say something else?”

“Then they’re the enemy. Cut them the fuck down,” is the sharp answer. 

“Since when has Ulric been worried about traitors in his ranks?” 

But Ignis’s words are caught up in a sharp gasp that isn’t his, a sharp sound that’s just as sharply cut off, and Prompto tenses for a second.

Until he says, “Sentries. That was the third one. Still counting, Prompto?”

“Yeah,” she says. “I still have movement heading in your direction. Two to start with.”

“And more on the way. I know that much. Be careful,” he adds.

“Why is he telling us to be careful when he’s the one who stepped in it?” 

Rhetorical question? Hard to tell, sometimes, with Noctis. 

Sip of water from the small flask that she returns to her back pocket, and then Prompto spots the next group. Gets back on the radio. “Noctis. Block over, hair to the left. I count seven on foot.”

“Got it, thanks,” and there’s no mistaking the sounds coming in from her end of the circuit. Small, small puffs, no louder than exhaling for breath, because she’s using pistols and not the shotgun that she carries in its extended holster. The extended snouts of suppressors. The sounds of bodies hitting the road are louder, and at the same time easier to ignore.

Prompto sweeps again, left to right and back, just to make sure she can cover the widest possible area that she can with the sniper rifle and its scope.

Lying down here on this rooftop, all by herself, doesn’t mean she’s safe -- and that’s why she’s taken her cut-down rifle out of its harness and securing straps, that’s why she’s got it loaded and ready to cock and fire, heavy weight of it tucked in at her side and slowly growing warm because it’s in the shelter of her body, out of the wind and the merciless tick of the long night and its long moments.

Just in case.

“Group down.” Ignis, who doesn’t even sound winded. “Prompto, I’m clear for now. Seven, only one in Izunia colors.”

“Got it,” she mutters back. “Anyone else in contact?”

“I got one more -- hang on,” she hears Noctis say. “Okay. Clear for now. Ten in that group, most of them not Izunias either.”

“Lunafreya,” Prompto says. “You okay?”

Instead of an answer to the question, she hears her say, “Hearth and home.”

Prompto goes tense, tries to swing the scope in her direction, and steels herself to fire.

But all she hears over the circuit is a chorus of jeers and laughter. 

“What the fuck’s a hearth?” Nasal, pitchy, and a whistle on the sibilant sounds. 

“You’re carrying LC gear but you’re not one of them,” says a second voice, lower rumbling, like thunder on the move. “Who are you, someone new?”

“Stella, I’m Stella,” she hears Lunafreya say, and she lies quiet and easy and gentle.

Prompto allows herself a small smile, knowing about the gun that Lunafreya carries in clear sight -- and the multitude of short blades she keeps up her sleeves. 

“And what makes you say I’m not one of them?”

“You don’t sound like any of the others.”

Gentle, mocking: the sound of Lunafreya’s brittle laugh. “As if you knew how the, how did you put it? The others? As if you knew how they sounded.”

Snort, loud and clear down the lines. The same voice that had asked about hearths. “Lady, you can keep sassing him all day.”

“Shut up Tredd.” Rough accents, rough words, and something that sounds almost like determination, in that new voice: quiet and stern.

“Come on, Ulric, what the fuck,” the low rumbling voice says, sounding a little surprised, Prompto thinks. “I thought you were staying home this time.”

“As if I had anything to do, when Pelna and Amira have things in hand.”

And Prompto nearly warns the others, but then they’re all laughing on Lunafreya’s end of the line, as if someone’s cracked another joke: and even in this uneasy night there doesn’t seem to be any sort of wary edge in them.

“I could almost be envious,” and only the sigh on the end of the words allows her to understand that it’s Noctis speaking. “I wish I could -- get people going, like he does.”

“This is no time for you to be comparing yourself with another.” Now that’s Ignis, with his own steely edges on the words. 

“Okay, I’ll stop. Prompto? Please don’t think less of me for what I just said.”

“You’re human, Noctis,” she mutters. “You’re just as human as I am. So I get it. You know I do. We get the hard nights, too.”

“Hmm. If that’s the case, Noctis, then I offer my apologies. Still, the timing could be better.”

“Ignis, you’re just being yourself and I appreciate that,” she hears Noctis say. “Nice to hear you apologize, though.”

The determined voice comes back on Lunafreya’s line. “I assume I’m speaking to, well, common interests.”

She hears Noctis laugh, a little strained. “Nyx Ulric, don’t think you’re going to be able to recruit my friend.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it.”

More hooting, more laughter, darker and more amused now.

“They don’t seem to believe you,” Noctis continues.

“Because my people are assholes and I wouldn’t have them any other way. How’s tricks?”

“Why don’t I let my oversight answer that. Oh, and you’re not recruiting _her_ , either.”

“Why do you sound so possessive all of a sudden?”

Cough of a laugh, from Ignis’s end of the circuit.

“Oh, I think I see,” she hears Nyx say, before he’s addressing her: “Oversight, is it? Situation report?”

She takes a deep breath, before keying her radio on: “Oversight. Call me Versus.”

“Nice to meet you, call-me-Versus. I’m Nyx, and I guess I’m still the leader of the Stormland families. Though every night I go out I wonder if I’ll come home to a shanking, courtesy of Pelna. Or to Amira putting a boot in my ass and then going to sit in my chair.”

“Keep wishing, Nyx,” she hears Noctis say. “It almost sounds like you want that to happen.”

“No comment, Princess.”

“Watch it, only Gladio gets to call me that.”

“Give him my regards.” A sound like a chuckle and a cleared throat. “Excuse the conversational detour. Versus? You still there?”

Prompto has to fight the sudden instinct to roll her eyes. “For a given value of there. Here.”

“Ha. Funny. Now, is there a reason why Noctis sounds like she’s got her claws in you?”

“Other way around,” she snaps. “Ask her why she sounds like I’ve got my claws in her.”

She lets herself grin, just a little, when Noctis reacts with a low laugh.

“Oh, I see how it is.” Breath, and then she can hear the steel in that voice, like temperatures plunging, like rain that suddenly turns into sleet and then into hail, wounding with every word. “This is my, our, turf those assholes are in, the ones you’re currently hunting. _Where are they._ ”

Night, and clouds, and smoke brooding over this part of the city, and she watches all the more keenly for its roiling stillness, for the cold that pinches at her fingertips, for the wind that moans overhead. 

And, as if in answer, it happens like this: 

Ignis, clearing his throat -- 

Noctis, growling out a curse -- 

Lunafreya, bite of tension in her words: “I have movement here, I can hear it, I can feel it -- we’ve got wheels on the move -- ”

Swing of the scope in that direction and she bares her teeth, and hisses. “Convoy, I see the convoy. Three eight-wheelers, escorts on foot, call it three dozen to start.” Somehow she remembers to use the false name that Lunafreya had given the Stormland ranks. “Stella? Can you find or make a defensible position?”

Before she can answer: 

“Oversight.” Nyx, on the line once again. “ETA on the opposing forces?”

Blink. Blink. She knows that phrase; she’s heard it before, from the ones who’d stood outside the door of her pretty prison cell. The ones who’d stood on the other side of that huge slab of steel, who’d talked about deployments and casually gunning down their enemies. “You were a soldier?” she asks. 

“Most of us were, now give me that estimate please, unless you want us to get -- Stella? -- out of here first. We can pull back to a better position, make it easier for our people to come in and reinforce us.”

“Ignis,” she mutters. 

“Both lines of strategy could be useful,” he begins.

“We don’t have time. So: hybrid,” Noctis snaps, suddenly. “Nyx? Pull back just enough that you look obvious about it, just enough that you’ll look like a nice easy target. Ignis and Versus and I will link up with you, so we can change out these things we’re carrying for -- heavier shit. Think high-caliber, you hear me? Think a fucking bunker. That’s us, that’ll be us. Give us good guns and armor.”

“You want us to be the bait and then you’re going to -- what?” she hears Nyx ask.

And, hard on the heels of that, “Noctis.” 

The first response on the lines is a loud and lethal hiss. “Stella. We’ll pass oversight to you when we link up. And then we’re going to try and circle around them. Turn the battlefield into an enclosed space, you see? Where the bad guys know where you are, and they don’t know we’re there. And we’ll take the back ranks down, herd them towards you, so you can take them out however you like. You have my permission to be creative. Do you copy, Stormland?”

“Stormland copies, permission included. Libertus!” Nyx roars, now. “Nest and tower, you know where to go, now get your ass in gear and move! Get it ready for us -- and tell everyone else what we’re doing!”

“I’m gone,” and that’s the rumbling voice that had laughed so heartily, earlier -- now that voice is nothing but crisp and clear acknowledgment. “Stella, you wanna come with me? I promise I’ll watch your back, I just need someone to watch mine.”

“With pleasure,” she hears Lunafreya say. “On both counts. Noctis, I’m getting off the circuit for now; but please, if you would be so kind -- follow us quickly.”

“We intend to. And stay off the radios until we link up.”

“Got it.” 

Click, and silence on that end.

Noctis breathes, rapid and shallow, for her next words. “Prompto. Still there?” 

“Yeah.”

“Pack it up, but keep watching the incoming until I tell you to get the fuck out of there.”

“Copy that,” she mutters.

“Ignis, come and get me -- ” 

High brief piercing whine of static, of interference, before: “Ignis here, I have Noctis, we’re on the move -- ”

Whatever else he might have been planning to say is suddenly cut off by the deadly percussion of explosions: and Prompto cries out at the flash that wrecks her night-adjusted vision, and very nearly gets to her feet, as she sees the bloom of smoke and lurid flames. 

“What the absolute _fuck_.”

And she has to tell herself that she can feel better, hearing the cold low anger of Noctis. That she can hear those rough words tearing the night open, tearing past her own fears to reach for her, to wrap her in Noctis’s power, in Noctis’s presence. 

“Can you see anything?”

“No,” she snaps in return -- and then there’s another explosion, and another, and another.

Marching closer.

The intersection directly below her vanishes in the choking rumbling stink, in the echoes and in the wreckage of those huddled houses, and she curses, quietly. “They know you take oversight with you.”

“Used to be Cindy, if not myself,” is the half-muffled reply from Ignis.

“Right, so now I can’t do anything from here, because I’m telling you right now, they’re looking for me, and they want my ass dead whether they can actually see me or not,” she hisses. “I guess I’m meeting you a few minutes earlier than we planned.”

“We’re still a few minutes out,” and that’s Noctis’s voice, hoarse warning. “Stay put. Let us get to you first.”

“Yeah, no, it’s harder to hit a moving target,” she says. “Give me a landmark to get to.”

“Not the nest and tower that they were talking about -- you remember that one, though, we passed it on the way in.”

She does: the looming shape reaching up into the night, thin and gray, like a solid shadow. “Too far,” she says, and she breaks down the sniper rifle in a handful of motions, in clicks and clacks that don’t even echo in the shaken night. 

“Still think you need to stay in place,” she hears Ignis say.

“Can you really tell me I’m safer up here, safe and -- useless as a clay bird? Can you really believe that?” Pieces of the rifle, that she secures into the pockets of a long bag, padded on the insides to protect the workings. Weight of it on her shoulders that almost bows her down, where she’s already wearing a ballistic vest beneath her coat, over a long-sleeved black tunic, and she groans, a little, and tries to find the right way of carrying everything comfortably. 

“We would at least know where you were.”

Long laces on her boots, long enough that she pulls out the knots and then redoes them with doubled hitches, because she doesn’t have time to trip and fall, not with the gritty ash that’s already falling onto the rooftop. Falling onto her mouth, so she has to spit before she responds: “If I move to street level, I might even get to clear a path for you.”

Last she checks her guns, her ammunition: the pistol slung at her hip and the extra magazines. Weight in her pockets that allows her to remember exactly how many rounds she’s carrying for the one working rifle she’s currently got.

“Prompto.” Quiet word on the line.

“Noctis,” she murmurs back.

“Last intersection before we dropped you off at that building. The one behind: what do you remember of it?”

She shelters from the wind and the smoke and the panic in the stairwell that leads back into the interior of the building, her hand on the other side of a door that had been locked at the beginning of the night, until she’d sneaked in and shot out the padlock and the latch. Black-powder pattern branded into the crumbling material, now, and she bows her head, and thinks.

“Flower shop. Am I right? Is there a flower shop at that intersection? I’ll meet you there, but not next to the windows. I’m not looking to die from an exploded window.”

“Yes, there’s a flower shop, and yes, we’re not meeting next to the windows. Find whatever cover you can and -- and leave us some kind of signal, so we know we’re getting close to you.”

She touches the hat covering the bright copper of her hair, straggling a little now, needing a trim now, where it’d be brushing her shoulders. “I’ll take off my cap.”

“That will do, as long as you put it back on quickly,” she hears Ignis say. “Move, now, hurry. And perhaps do as Lunafreya has done: stay off the radios until you get to your destination.”

“Got it. See you soon,” she says.

Stairs in quickstep; landings in slow silence. Her hands are loose and ready on her rifle, and her heart is beating out a rhythm that’s loud enough to bring the whole building down around her ears.

The street is even worse: the tangled chaos of structures and alleys and all the emptied rooms, and the moan of the night winds, all combine to create confusing echoes all around her. Her own breath gusting out in sharp short bursts. The rattle and cry of oncoming boots, and only some of those sounds are her own, the impacts of her own feet against cracked cement, against grit and asphalt and craters in the curbs. 

“Get it together,” she hisses at herself -- and even that creates more sounds, more confusion.

She’s darting across another empty stretch of road, beneath empty-gazing windows, when the idea to use her own sounds hits her: and she whistles a short phrase of melody, melancholy and sweeping, and the echoes are more than enough to cover up her own footsteps as she tries to remember where Noctis’s intersection might be.

Sad lilt of the song, the notes struggling up into the air with her faltering breaths, when she can’t even remember what it’s called. 

All she knows is that she might have heard it somewhere in the long nights of building the defenses of the Citadel: of propping up mattresses and cleaning all kinds of guns, even ones that she could only recognize by their inner mechanisms. Low notes that ripple even in her chest, even as she keeps moving, ducking and weaving all by herself and --

That’s a problem: if she’s hearing other voices, if she’s hearing other footsteps, where are they coming from?

Dead-end alleyway, and maybe now she thinks she can see the intersection she’s trying to get to, and she closes her eyes and tries to listen to the stutter and to the shadows of the world. Hands on her guns, ready to fire at any moment. Mind, straining to make sense of the nothing of the night -- 

Revving, like engines coming back to life from idling, and they’re too close -- they’re practically on top of her, they’re practically on the other side of the walls and the foot of the alley, and she knows this to be real and not a trick, not a phantom in the night, because she can feel the vibrations in her boots, in her teeth -- 

She makes her decision: she turns away from the intersection. Braces her rifle against her forearm and starts moving forward -- 

“Versus?”

She blinks. Whispers. “Stella. We’re supposed to be staying off the radios.”

Sigh, quiet and maybe annoyed. “Is that what they’ve done? I’ve been trying to raise them for the past few minutes. Foolish, foolish.”

“Then call me a fool, too.”

“No, Versus.” 

She almost smiles because there are too many sharp edges in that answer -- but all she says is, “Are you all right?”

“They -- seem to be looking out for me, here,” is the quiet response. “And I’m in the tower. I -- did you know I’ve got clean lines of sight to this sector of the city, to almost all of it? This is your position. You should be here, and I should be watching your back. The firing lines are so much better. You’d be unstoppable with your rifle. With either of them.”

“I hope I can get up to you at some point,” she mutters. “Not sure about right now, though.”

“That wasn’t what we discussed, was it? What are you doing?”

“Changing the plan,” she mutters. “For Noctis’s sake.”

“I cannot argue with your motives, but -- did you at least think to tell her that’s what you’re doing?”

“Not important. And can’t do it anyway.”

“So you didn’t. Hang what she said, I’ll raise her now -- ”

“No!” Somehow she keeps the word down to a hiss. “I mean. Please don’t do that. I -- I’m trying to take advantage of the echoes, I’m trying to make sure I can at least find out what’s going on here -- I’m, what do the guys in the Citadel say? The ones posted on the doors and above it? I’m securing the perimeter. Something like that.”

“But are you safe?”

“As much as I can be.” She coughs, and peers around a corner. “Hey, you said you’re in that place? You have good lines of sight? Can you actually see me?”

“I can follow you as long as you’re moving. So yes,” is the quiet answer.

“Okay. Okay. Things that are moving, you can see those better than things that aren’t still. So -- the thing I can hear, the thing that’s making that awful fucking noise -- is it moving or not? Meaning, is it actually something you can find right now?”

She starts moving down another block -- each step takes her deeper into unfamiliar territory -- she doesn’t feel any shame in scrambling down to her hands and knees whenever she sees strange shadows. “Stella.”

“Sorry. I was looking for something to help me see better, and Libertus was kind enough to lend me the scope for one of the other soldiers’ rifles,” and Lunafreya coughs, sounds a little embarrassed. “This isn’t as good as the ones we have back at the Citadel.”

“If I could give you the one I’m carrying right now,” she whispers, “I’d find a way to fly it up to you. But right now I just want to know if it does the job.”

“Yes, yes, it does. Turn left and stay low.”

She does as she’s told and catches a glimpse of battered sedans in a cluster. “Cars, I’ve got cars? Stella, they’re not moving, I don’t know if you’ll be able to find some other way of keeping track of them.” She blows out an angry breath. “Fucking echoes, I thought I was dealing with shit like trucks. Other trucks.”

“Those are coming my way, not yours.”

She stops, thrown for a moment. “Shit. They’re still headed for you?”

“Well.” Soft laughter. “It seems that when they were retreating, when they were making their way here, Nyx and the others were able to take out one of the trucks -- I’m not clear on the details, you understand, but they blew it up? Somehow? So there are still enemies heading our way, but we’ve sort of cut them down a little. That was the idea, wasn’t it.”

“Yeah.” She smiles, a little, but the smoke and the fumes make her wince and cough and then she slips around another corner. “Okay. One less thing for Noctis and Ignis to worry about.”

“That leaves you, actually: do you really want to investigate those cars by yourself? I’ll -- I’ll find someone to help you out, I’m sure they can spare someone to head to your position -- ”

“Stella?”

“Yes -- Versus?”

“Watch over the others, that’s the plan, you need to stick to it.”

“Brave words, when you’ve already thrown a dozen wrenches into it. May I remind you that you’re supposed to be going in the other direction?”

“Yes, but Stella, you and I know about these cars and they don’t, and even if they did they wouldn’t be in any kind of position to do anything about it. I’m already on the move and I’ve got my guns, and I’m trying to get this under control so they don’t have to worry about -- about -- ”

She chokes on the thought that writhes beneath her skin. 

“Versus.”

She covers her face with her hands for just a moment. “The last thing I want is for Noctis to get shot in the back.”

“And the last thing _she_ wants is to lose you -- I haven’t even known you that long and I already understand that,” is the quiet and sharp response. 

Ducking into an alcove of a shattered door and an empty room, the wooden boards cracking underfoot with her barest footstep, her barest shift of weight. “Stella -- ”

Step, behind her. 

“Versus out,” she whispers, and even as she’s whirling she’s cocking her cut-down rifle, swinging it all the way around and up and at the end of the arc she’s pointing the muzzle into the shadow of a face, the shadow of a grin -- a grin that’s nothing more than a lie, nothing more than a promise of pain and of screams -- 

“You have very pretty eyes.”

Not Ardyn, not Ardyn, her mind screams in its panicked whirl, nothing at all like a consolation. Nothing at all like a sop to her torn heart.

It’s not Ardyn, just someone close enough to make no difference at all.

Just his right hand, his constant companion.

One of the minds that developed the red drug.

“Do you know, I think you might look familiar.”

Prompto can’t even draw the breath to shout, to call for some kind of help that isn’t within earshot and isn’t going to get to her in time, and only the pulse of the blood in her hand gone suddenly numb and cold and clammy is moving, swift tiny twitch and tug of the cramp that starts in her arm and stabs through her like a million pins and needles, and she wants to pull the trigger and she’s about to drop to her knees, useless and helpless before this man, this Caligo -- 

“Hold it right there. Nobody move.”

Voice from behind her, quiet and cold and compelling.

But Caligo’s still right there, still reaching out for her, and in the moment before he makes contact, in the last moment before she can think about jerking away and fighting him with her fists, with her feet, with the entire weight of her rolled-up sniper rifle that might as well be on the other side of the moon with how she can’t even use it -- the cramp tightens and tightens, and she does scream -- a tiny choked sound -- when the pain finally explodes in her straining nerves.

When it causes her to drop her gun.

Smile, ugly and twisting, on Caligo’s mouth -- he’s smiling down at her as if she’s someone’s cast-off toy, twisted and left behind in a gutter -- some fragile doll to be manhandled and broken -- he seizes her neck in a relentless hard grip and all her breath is suddenly cut off -- 

Fuck, fuck, those are his fingers in his mouth and -- no no no no! -- he’s pressing something onto her tongue and she thrashes in his grip, she tries to shriek, tries to fight that bitter taste -- she has to get away, she has to spit, she has to throw up -- 

_Bang_

Pressure released from her, and the arc of him falling away from her, falling back and the spray of blood that she can smell, the snuffling sounds of him moaning in pain: these are the last things she sees and hears in the world, because in the rush of trying to catch her breath she swallows -- blink, blink, realizing what she’s done -- and she screams -- 

Seizing, seizing, her nerves unstringing themselves, undoing themselves into fever-mad knots, the world splintering flying flashing into mindless pieces and she doesn’t even register that she’s falling, too -- doesn’t even register the smash of impact -- the back of her head contacting the jagged edges in the floor and in the foundation -- 

It’s like swaying in the grip of a fierce wind, it’s like watching the world unravel before her eyes: the building shivers itself apart and the walls and the windows are leering laughing faces, the shadows are pointing at her and drawing blood with each spasming breath --

Words, words, falling onto her. Are they her own words? Is someone talking to her? Something about the night and something about fire, and something about the moon. Flowers and owls and the scream and the song of birds. Pearls! Someone is talking about pearls and she wants to join the conversation, wants to talk about what pearls look like when they’re bleeding into someone’s skin, because she likes pearls, but not to wear for herself -- she likes the feeling of pearls warming against skin -- 

And all the while it hurts, it hurts: a forest of thorns wrapped around her heart and its mad flyaway flashing beat, the blood that runs in her eyes sparking into terrible edges, and she’s blind and screaming and every nerve is on fire, the blood in her veins is tearing through her, and she runs out of breath to scream and now all she can do is gulp, soundlessly, her voice completely gone and shattered and still the mad need chokes her, names caught between her tongue and her teeth, names running together into a formless mass --

The world crashes against her, like tides, like multitudes of pain, and she didn’t know that there were other voices in that world: or at least there’s one she can hear, and there are words she can almost understand:

“What did he give you?”

It wasn’t given, she thinks, it wasn’t given, she doesn’t want it, she’s racked on it, she’s tearing apart at the seams, stitches ripping, shouldn’t she be lying in a pool of her own blood by now?

Pressure on her eyes and she screams, catching glimpses and sparks of fierce white light and in the aftermath a face, a man’s face, not the one who’d drugged her. Mountain range of a face, the broken angles and the worn-in lines, eyes like hoar-frost and icicles -- she can’t even raise her hand to push him away --

Lifting. The sensation of being wrapped in -- rough things. Is she a thing to be placed in a bag and stowed away until the next time she’s needed? But those clear cold-blue eyes are looking intently into hers, straight solemn lines, tight clench of muscles in the jaw. 

“Stay with us.”

She has a thousand questions on the tip of her tongue, and -- and the others! The Stormland ranks! Ignis and Lunafreya and, and -- Noctis -- 

Oh, _fuck_ , she can’t -- how can she go back to them after this, shivering and mindless and raving and shattered -- 

When the darkness finally comes to pull her away from her ragdoll thoughts, her blasted senses, she thinks she weeps, and chases that darkness with relief like panic and like claws --


	12. noctis interlude, two

“ -- I’ll say that again, because I’m worried and I’m fairly certain I’m not the only one feeling that way. I know what I said. I know you all saw what I was doing. But I’m me and you know that. I can’t leave a job half-done, or half-assed.”

Steady, steady, that quiet voice, almost pleasant. Almost cool.

The voice of a man who barks out commands. The voice of a man who leads.

She’d follow him, too, if the world had been different, if she’d been different, if if if --

Nyx’s words stop. Jagged edges in the lines of his face. She’s seen him smile and laugh and make fun of the men and women who whirl around him, who rush screaming into a fight right at his back. She’s seen him weep, once, exactly once, holding one of his fallen soldiers in his arms and swearing revenge into eyes already blinded with blood and death. She’s seen him snarling and vicious, a pure cutting wind of fury, the blade-focus of his eyes over the matte-black hardware of a gun.

Now his words stop and he looks -- briefly -- like burning, like sorrow, like bitter mourning regret, and she never wants to see that look on his face again.

Why does he look like he’s lost someone he loves, when, when -- he’d never even met Prompto, not even properly, and he only ever refers to her by the name she’d suddenly assumed -- he refers to her with a false name, as he continues to speak --

“Noctis brought in some new oversight tonight. Some of you might have heard her on the radio link-ups. Versus, that’s her name. We lost her for a bit, you know how firefights go.”

“Never as fucking planned,” says a female voice in the crowd sitting around the massive round table that dominates this, the single massive room sheltering in the depths of Nyx’s stronghold.

“Ain’t that the truth?” Lopsided smile, that Noctis can clearly see doesn’t reach Nyx’s eyes. “So. We lost Versus for a bit but now we know exactly where she is, and as of ten minutes ago, we have eyes directly on her, like, right in the same room. Problem is: that room and where it is. 

“Versus is in the Leide area. And yes, I know who’s trying to hold on to those streets. I know what we’ve got to deal with right now.”

“Long damn fucking night, is what it is,” and that rough voice belongs to Libertus, the hearty veneer of it and the deep crackling anger that runs beneath that veneer.

She knows that, too.

Everything else that she doesn’t know -- that weight of everything else that bears her down now -- 

“Yeah.” Hiss of Nyx taking a breath. “We know where Versus is. We know she’s alive. After that, details are sketchy as fuck. But she may not be doing well, is the only report I’ve got. And by that I mean -- she’s been drugged, and we don’t know how much of a dose she got and we don’t even know what drug it was, so we’re operating on the presumption that she’s been forced to OD -- ”

The room erupts into angry hisses.

Of all the gangs running in Insomnia, Nyx’s crew is the only one that she knows has never, never touched anything like drugs, despite the money of it, despite the easiness of it. 

And she’s heard the stories about Nyx himself: garbled mutters about sobriety, and what happens to him every single time he loses it, and the abyss of his come-downs. So it’s sort of easy to understand the distaste that seems to twist in his mouth, every time he says things like _drugs_ and _OD_ and _Versus_.

And every time she hears those words in the here and now -- every time she’s reminded of what’s been going on tonight -- she clenches her hands into fists. Joints of her hand moving, the knuckles pushing through her skin, the crack of her own sinews fighting her own thoughts, her own impulses. 

She imagines blood pooling in her hands and drip-drip-dripping out of her, salt and rust and bitter tears mingling.

Here, in this room that’s the very heart of Stormland operations, she listens to Nyx speak and she’s alone, she’s alone, because Lunafreya’s run off to who the fuck knows where, and Ignis is trapped in one of the doorways leading into the room, unable to come in any further, because of the sheer press of people listening. A fair majority of Nyx’s ranks, crowded together in anxious knots and chains. 

The round table is ragged and it’s surrounded by equally ragged chairs, and most of the chairs are taken, and all eyes are on the man who’s standing up next to the table.

Which means that here in the corner where she might be trying to hide, trying not to draw attention to herself, she might be free: free to hide her hands beneath the pile of her coat in her lap, so nobody has to see the cast of her knuckles, the blood she’s managed to draw from her left palm -- sharp flare of pain in her hand, every time she snags her own skin on the half-split nail on her little finger -- 

Movement in the room leads her back to Nyx as he turns away from the table. As he bows his head. “It wasn’t a good night, all things considered. But we’ve got another day to make things better. To make things right. So -- back to your posts, everyone. Try to get a little rest. Changeover at daybreak. Business as usual. 

“Everyone who came along tonight, make sure you get your shit sorted out or I will find a very blunt knife and I will personally shove it right into your guts -- and I’ll twist it, too. Dismissed.”

Where is Lunafreya? Last Noctis’d seen of her, she was nothing more than a swaying sweating long anxious breath, the line of her shoulders gone rigid with worry. Promises curdling on the back of Noctis’s tongue, the solemn oath she’d sworn to Sylva Nox Fleuret, to keep her daughter alive -- at the very least she ought to find out why Lunafreya’s been so anxious, why she’s all but falling apart.

But Noctis stays in the corner and stares wordlessly at her own boots, pinned down and numb and -- her emotions are flowing away from her. Is it a relief to be released from the brambles that are choking the very life out of her, that are slowing down the beat of her heart? No, not when numbness means she can’t even grasp for the -- the memory of Prompto’s smile, warm and carefully widening. The way she leans forward onto her toes when she’s addressing a target. The dance of her hands when she’s losing a ton of money at liar’s dice. 

Ice catching at Noctis’s heart, at Noctis’s throat, and she can’t even make herself sit, not even when there’s a firm step moving towards her, not even when there are hands pushing a now-empty chair in her direction. A hand on her shoulder, unexpected landing.

She shakes that hand off; looks up, blank and glaring and cold, into Nyx Ulric’s face. 

“I’ll let you know the minute Amira gets in touch.”

Amira: the name of one of Nyx’s officers. Who had left the building almost as soon as they’d all come in from the long hours of trying to link up, of trying to smash the remainder of the attacking Izunias, of trying to find each other. Who, Noctis now knows, has been placed in charge of looking for Prompto.

Has already located her.

Prompto is in the Leide neighborhoods.

For what that knowledge is worth, anyway, and she clamps her teeth shut around the urge to scream at him. Scream for answers, for reasons, for anything that will make things make sense. Make this night make sense.

Prompto. Prompto, taken by the police in their uniforms and badges and guns, because she’d run headlong into some kind of scrap, some kind of fight, and she still doesn’t know what to make of the conversations that Lunafreya had relayed -- something about wanting to watch her back.

Something about wanting to watch Noctis’s back. 

Something about making sure no one would be able to ambush her.

It must be Nyx who turns off most of the lights in the room -- she sees his shadow linger in one of the doors -- and now she is one of its last occupants.

The only other person there is the one who returns to her side. The one who speaks her name. “Noctis.”

She breathes in. Breathes out.

Fails to contain the single sob that seems to grow in her throat, that seems to throw off wicked edges, so her eyes prickle with pain and with tears and she clenches her hands once again -- renews the crescent-wound in her palm and adds to it, fresh sparks of white-hot pain -- and she turns her head, that lands on a bony warm shoulder, and she doesn’t wail. She doesn’t. 

Arms around her and the repetition of her name: “Noctis, Noctis.”

“Ignis,” she whispers back. “Ignis? What did we do? Where did we go wrong?”

“Noctis. I don’t know about what we did or what we didn’t do.” His breath, too loud, over the top of her head. “All I know, all I can understand, is what happened. And I can’t even be too sure of it.”

“Prompto never made it to the intersection. Never made it to the flower shop.”

Another sigh. “No. What did Lunafreya say? She was trying to clear the area. Trying to make sure there would be no one to take you unawares.”

“Cars. Has anyone found out what the fuck those cars were doing? Why they were there? The people in those cars.” Disjointed thoughts spilling from her mouth. She winds her arms around Ignis, and hangs on. “There were people in those cars and they were either the people who drugged Prompto or the people who took her away, and -- I need to find them, don’t I? I need to find them and, and burn them? Burn them and the people in them too?”

“If doing that right this instant would restore Prompto to you, then believe me, Noctis. I’d hand you the fuel and the matches myself.” Maybe he’s holding her, too, but she can’t be too sure. She can only feel the pressure of his voice, of his presence. “But we don’t know. We still don’t know half of what happened to her. And until then, there’s nothing we can do -- ”

“I refuse to believe that,” she snarls, and she curls her hand once again into a fist, catching on the heavy material of his coat, of his sleeve. “I refuse to believe that there’s nothing we can do. We owe it to her, we owe it to her to find her and get her back and get her _home_!”

Does she stand up on her own? Does she push him away? Does she stumble, in the abruptness of her movements? All she knows is shouting at Ignis, is trying to get away -- but she’s fallen onto her ass in this room, hard enough she can still feel the pain that shrieks down the nerves of her, rough floor beneath her. 

Looking up into Ignis’s face, where he’s halfway to his own feet. The bright eyes and unshed tears of him. The hand that he extends to her, that seems steady -- but she takes it and then she can feel the tremors of him, the shaking in his fingertips. 

She has to stumble over to the table so she can keep standing upright, and she can see -- tears falling, and striking the table, and drying into dark stains.

“Some _Donna_ I am.”

“Noctis. Please don’t. Don’t say that.”

“I’ve got to say it so I can get it out, so I can escape it and walk away from it.” She doesn’t quite growl at him. “Let me say it once so I can leave it behind. It’s what I do. Why are you still trying to fight it? Why are you still trying to fight me on this?”

“For the simple reason that I cannot, I cannot bear to hear you call yourself such terrible things.”

She sighs, and keeps looking down at the table -- but she extends one of her hands to him. “Ignis.”

Clammy his palm that wraps protectively around her wounded knuckles. Gritty. Rough texture of the bandages he’s wearing now, from too many powder burns, from picking up too many guns that had been thrown down into the dirt of the streets. Burned and scraped, and clinging to her. 

“Noctis,” she hears him say. And: “Forgive me. I do know why you -- say those words. You’re releasing them, you’re letting them out of you, so they don’t fester. So they don’t hurt you for long. But how can I stand by and not hear them, and not hate them? Do you really think that I couldn’t -- hate those words? Those terrible words. How could you think that I couldn’t hate these nights that make you say them?”

“You can come on out and say it. I keep fucking telling and telling you.” Tired, tired, she’s so tired and thirsty and she braces herself on the table, tries not to collapse onto its pitted grooves and cracks. “You can say that you hate this place. This fucking city. It isn’t even yours. You can hate it. It’s taken so much from you. It’s hurt you over and over again.”

“Same city that brought me to you. One gift to balance all its ills.”

She can’t even look at him when she shakes her head. “I don’t know a lot of people who’d call me a gift.”

“I would. Iris and Cindy and Lunafreya would. And Prompto would, too.”

“And what do all of you get out of it but -- people shooting at you. People trying their goddamned hardest to kill you, and preferably hurt you first, because they know they have to walk over your fucking corpses, because they know you’re the obstacles in their path, because they know they can get me but only if you’re dead and buried and gone.”

Tug of his hand and she’s pulled up against him: against his bent shoulders, against his bowed head, against his fists clenching on her sleeves. “I knew all that on the first day I came here. I knew all that when I learned who you were. What you and your mother were trying to do. I knew all of that and -- you know what I chose. You know I made a decision, you know what that decision was.”

“Yeah. You made a decision. Covered in oil and petrol and your own damned blood. You did,” she says, and she makes herself look up into his face. Makes herself touch his scars. “You did and they did. Every single one of you. You all did the same fucking thing. And tell me, Ignis. Tell me. How many times have you regretted that decision? How many nights have you spent wishing you could get away from all your vows?”

“I couldn’t tell you.” Lift, twitch, the corner of his mouth moving -- but he’s not smiling. He’s solemn, here, by her side, and his words are small and solemn too. “I couldn’t tell you because I’ve lost count, so -- perhaps don’t bother to do so, in the future. I would suggest you talk to Prompto about it instead.”

“Why did you have to say it,” she mutters, and she clocks how his eyes go wide and startled with her words. “Why did you have to say her name? Why did you have to remind me?”

“Noctis -- ”

“Don’t give me that. You know what you did. You know what you said.” Jagged pain that catches her heart in claws. Jagged enough to catch in her own words, that leave her like tearing her apart. “You said her name. I don’t know what I’m doing any more. She’s not, not a convenient symbol to me. She’s her own damn self and I can see her struggle to decide what it is, every damn day, every damn hour I can snatch away to be with her. And yet, yet, failing her now, I feel like I’ve failed this whole thing. This whole fucking city! This whole fucking life of mine that you -- you and her -- you’re hellbent on protecting me, but what the fuck for? And you, you have your regrets about it and now -- now I just fucking handed her a reason to regret what she’s done, what she’s decided!

“Regret this night and all her promises -- maybe even regret the, the thing,” and she slaps herself in the throat, hard enough that she chokes on her next breath.

Her bare neck, her bared throat, where she’s not wearing the necklace of blue pearls.

The next time she hears Ignis say her name, it’s a warning, it’s a feral hiss: “Noctis.”

She blinks.

He picks _now_ to be angry? He’s baring his teeth at her. He’s all up in her face and he’s all but snarling. “Don’t you dare. Don’t you _say_ it! I won’t stand for it! I don’t care if you said those words so you can let them go: take them back, _now_.”

“What the fuck,” she says, and wrenches away from him.

And he’s still moving towards her, and she thinks she can almost see him bristling: “I mean it, Noctis, if you’re talking about the pearls -- I forbid you! I will not listen to you say that she might regret those pearls, or regret giving them to you! I won’t have it -- and neither would she, if she were here!”

“Why?” she shouts back. She all but spits the words out. “Why are you invested in the pearls? Why are you invested in her?”

She watches him snap to a standstill. Watches the spark in his eyes as it breaks through, and sweeps away his frown: now he looks determined, in the tilt of his chin and the set of his jaw. 

He steps away and he’s nothing but anger in every line of him. 

“You were away.” The words start out small, and quiet enough that she has to strain to hear them. “You asked me to -- to be kind to Prompto. To welcome her. And she was afraid of me. She said so to my face.”

Where is he going with this? 

“I tried to speak with her. I tried to learn a little more about her. She knew immediately, you know. She knew how I felt about you. And in return she told me how she felt. She told me about the person that she might have been. She told me about wanting to be someone else. Wanting to be better. You should have seen her, Noctis, you should have been there, watching her think about what she wanted to do with her own life. What she wanted to do about herself and about you.” 

His shoulders, bowing, briefly, before he speaks again. “And on that night: do you know what she wanted to do? Do you know what she said to me? She said, _I have to do something for myself -- and then maybe I can talk to Noctis with a clear head._ ”

Whirl of him, turning again, and she can’t help but take a step backwards. The fervor that burns in his eyes is familiar. The emotions of him, plain in his eyes. “She took the pearls for herself, and for you. The same thing she does every night she goes out with us. The same thing she did, tonight -- yes, we told her what to do, and she did something else, but she did it for herself and she did it for you! And that night, that night, Noctis -- she decided on _you_ and I was there! I saw it! The moment she decided what she wanted to do. The moment she decided what she wanted to become! So -- you don’t get to regret that! You don’t get to say she might regret that!”

Before she can try to understand him -- before she can take his words and consider them, consider the person they’re talking about -- her nettled heart gets the better of her and she whirls back towards the table for the single and sole purpose of banging both fists onto its surface -- and the crack of her skin and bones against the sturdy wood is shockingly loud in the bated-breath quiet of the room. 

“And if that decision destroys her? If that decision kills her? I know her, too,” she shouts. “I know a little about her, too. And she’ll fight like you will. Like I will. She’ll fight for herself. For you! For me! And if fighting for herself and for us should get her hurt or killed, if fighting should destroy her -- tell me, Ignis, am I still not allowed to regret that? Regret these damn nights!

“What is wrong with you? I thought you knew me! I thought you knew how it hurts for me to see you hurting -- you and Cindy and Iris. My mother! You’ve seen me in my darkest hours! Why do I have those dark hours? Because of all the fucking people, I am fucking aware of what people, you people, need to do for me and for my mother! You’ve placed all your hopes in us! And we want to fulfill your hopes but, but, don’t think for one second I can’t see what needs to be done so we can do that -- don’t think for one second I can’t see the shit we have to do!

“And I? I placed all my hopes in Prompto! She sees me for who I really am and she feels the way she does for me anyway, and -- and what I’ve done, what I’m doing, I swear to the fucking damned gods I don’t believe in -- they know, you know, that it’s all fucked up! And I don’t want to fuck it up for her! She deserves to outlive me, she deserves something better than me! And I need her anyway and she says she needs me and I can’t, I can’t bear it, I can’t understand, why is she hurt and drugged and lost -- I, I, what have I done -- ”

The words finish bleeding from her at last, and the table is the only thing holding her upright. Her wrists shake, her arms, her shoulders, and she sobs, once, only once, loudly enough to nearly knock her down --

“Noctis.” Again her name. Again his voice. Again that terrible weight of knowing, in his face, when she looks at him through her tears.

She holds up a hand to ward him off. “I’m sorry,” she says, when she can breathe again. When she can speak again. “I keep doing that to you. You always seem to take my pain away. I rely on you for many things but I shouldn’t be relying on you for this. And not on her either.”

“I’ll get over it. And you need to get over it. You need to get over tonight. For Prompto’s sake.”

“Easy to say, isn’t it,” she says, and she covers her face with her hands.

Knock on one of the doors -- she thinks it might have been the same door through which Nyx had left --

She’s only relieved when she recognizes the light-edges blurring around the shape of Lunafreya, that rushes in at her and -- she catches the shadow of shock, the shadow of worry, windblown rough on her friend’s face. Lunafreya’s hands on her shoulders, catching her as well. Shaking her hard. “What is going on here? You have no time to lose, Noctis -- we must go.”

“Leide?” Ignis’s tactical voice, quiet steel like blades being drawn.

“Yes. But not an attack. I only have the rough idea. But -- they are asking for you,” she says. “Cor Leonis and his people. They are asking for you, and for your mother if we can muster the people we’ll need to protect her. But you, Noctis, at the very least: they are asking for you.”

“Why me.”

“It seems that it is not just Prompto that we have to worry about. I do not know anything else.”

The same door is filled with another shadow -- and Noctis holds up a hand again.

She looks to Lunafreya. To Ignis. “I’m asking you this time. You can leave me or you can come with me. You choose this time. It’s been a damn long night and it’s not going to end any time soon. So come with me or don’t come with me. This time I don’t command you.”

Maybe the words shake. Maybe she can’t entirely meet their eyes. Maybe she can’t entirely understand the worn ragged kindness that she sees when she looks back to the door -- when she catches the slow shaking movement of Nyx, his long hair in its beads and braids swinging against his shoulders. 

But she walks toward him, heading for the door and heading out into the uncertain world, the moaning wind in the night, and she inclines her head toward him -- and he returns the gesture without a smile, without any teasing spark in his eyes.

And Lunafreya falls in at her right. Ignis at her left. The worn presence of them, steady, and steadying her.

She clenches her hands into fists one last time, and she says, and doesn’t care who hears: “On our way, Prompto.”


	13. Chapter 13

A breath that tastes like dust. That rasps, that feels like thorns, like sharp edges wrapped around her throat and slowly, slowly pulling tight. A breath that’s heavy in her chest even as she tries for another one. Why can she taste something like the stale remnants of thick-clotted blood on her tongue? Isn’t there some kind of story about that, some kind of old advice? Never swallow blood, never let it get into the stomach or it’ll make a stone in the guts, it’ll cause cramps, it’ll cause the sickness to worsen and spread and -- well, isn’t that what’s already happening to her? 

Her thoughts swirl through her, sick and leaden as they scour through her, nonsense that wounds, nonsense that leaves welts and bruises behind, slowly reducing her to the shards of her grief. The shards of her self-loathing. The shards of her madness.

The world is heavy around her, and it feels like it takes every ounce of her strength to take one breath, and then to go on to the next, and strength has never been her best asset. Oh, sure, she can carry around the weight of a sniper rifle, in case she has to move from one vantage point to another -- those things are surprisingly heavy, with their shooting rests and their two and three and sometimes four legs. With their barrels and their huge bullets. She can carry all of those things if she has to, fully assembled, and run with the whole fucking unwieldy mechanism extended and deployed if things have gone to shit -- especially if things have gone to shit. 

But hauling ass with a sniper rifle takes such a fucking toll -- it’s never easy, never, and she always has to take a moment to correct her breathing and how she wants that moment now.

Now, in the space where she can almost, almost feel her body, and almost forget all the pain from -- earlier.

She shivers, and maybe she whimpers -- she’s not entirely sure about anything else, not even what her skin is telling her, not even what her ears are telling her. 

She was drugged again, and the drug caused her to lose control of her senses.

The spinning sickening rush of the high, and the even more sickening plunge back down into loss, into sobriety -- 

She doesn’t know how to get back the control that she’s lost.

So she breathes, so she fights for every breath, and she desperately wants to -- cry scream pray ask for help.

But who can help her now? Drugged, drunken, and now high and dry in the worst possible way, and she can’t even open her eyes for fear of -- finding blood on her skin. Clawed open by her nightmares. Clawed open by that man, that asshole, that utter bastard -- who forced that fucking drug into her like the red drug had been forced into her, violation piled onto violation, fuck him, fuck this, no no no no -- 

Breaths, breaths, someone else’s breaths, she almost thinks. Low long controlled hissing from very close by, from someone else because she knows the ragged helpless rhythm of her own breaths at least -- and that other rhythm stutters, staggers, only for a moment and then --

“Are you all right.”

“No, I -- I’ll never be all right again,” is what she wants to say, now that she’s lost track of the world, now that she’s lost track of who she is -- again -- what does that question even _mean_ now?

But now her breathing stops and she’s wracked by a fit of coughing, a fit of shivers, and she can’t even get the words out, and -- she hears it again, more urgent this time, the question, the question -- 

No, it’s not a question: it’s a blade, she thinks. It’s an accusation. _How can you be all right? How could you have survived those drugs without turning into something small and mean and little and wrong? How can you still be human after all of those drugs?_

Even as the thought follows through to its painful illogical conclusion she’s whimpering, she’s already halfway back to tears, because the questions are -- blades, they’re knives, they’re swords, driven right through her. She couldn’t even raise her shaking arms to defend herself, in the moment before she’d been forced to swallow that other drug -- and what defense exists against a thought, anyway, then _or_ now? How can she stop those terrible illogical ideas from cutting into her mind, from cutting her open, laying her bare? 

Ideas. Blades. All her nightmares and all her fears and all her regrets, the weight of all her sins.

The certain truth that the next thing to come after all this pain is -- disappointment.

Oh, gods, for the others to be disappointed in her -- they have to be, they must be, there’s no other way -- 

Just the very idea leaves Prompto moaning, retching. Sobs clogging in her throat, like she’s choking on the idea already, and she -- twists, turns, pulls herself into an agonized fetal position, nerve endings protesting all throughout her abused body, thoughts protesting all throughout her abused mind.

Life like bitter blood hot and burning on her tongue, like the bile that’s boiling up in her throat and she -- covers her mouth with trembling hands. The dry-heaving is almost worse, the painful spasms wracking her chest and her belly and nothing coming up, nothing but the air heaving from her lungs and she’s weeping before she can even stop to think about it -- before she can even stop herself -- and that, that’s so much worse -- 

“What have you done!”

A different voice, just as unknown as the first one was -- oh gods, oh fuckshit Astrals -- 

And the words are for her, of course they are, of course now she’s been found and now she’s going to get yelled at: and the sobs redouble in strength, in volume, and she thinks she really does have to throw up now. Her stinging eyes, her snot-streaming nose -- how, how can she _stop_? How can she stop _breathing_? Violent shivers and she feels the weight of hands on her shoulders, of arms around her shaking body, pulling her up and -- 

She goes limp. She doesn’t have the strength to do anything, much less fight back, twist away, run. 

She sobs, and she thinks she says, “Sorry, sorry, I’m so sorry -- please just don’t hurt me, please just -- ”

Over and over the words falling helplessly from her mouth, caught up in her sobs, choked with her tears. 

Lifted, forced upright, she doesn’t resist -- at least, not until she’s come to rest and -- the arms that pulled her up from the clammy dubious shelter of flat pillow and threadbare blanket are -- 

Holding her.

Still, and only, holding her. 

Sheltering her? She tries to understand the positions of those arms. One to support her, warm against her backbone, between her shoulders, somewhere in the vicinity of her ribs and the radiating pain of coughing and choking and trying not to be violently sick. 

The other arm, curling gently around her, but not to imprison her -- she simply feels the hand that lands on the back of her head, and she’s badly torn on the instinct to lean into it, but -- again the fact that she can’t recognize the voice that had been questioning her, or the voice that had been almost shouting, has her on the edge.

She goes tense, again.

“Easy. Easy, Prompto.”

That voice.

She’s heard that voice before: and more importantly, she’s heard that exact same worn-down kind of gentleness before. The words are rough-edged, hoarse -- the words are kind, but also -- crumbling, is the only word she can come up with. Unsteady walls around a fragile house, or a garden -- why does the voice seem so familiar, and why does the voice make her think of gardens, of flowers caught in a strong wind and in the pelting rain? Why is the voice so soft and why is it so persistent, as though, in those tones, the pain of storms could be swept away?

“Prompto. It’s all right. I promise you it’s all right. I know it’s all fucked right now but I’m telling you, I’m telling you, it’s all right. Breathe, Prompto, for me -- come on -- ”

And resisting only makes everything hurt all the more. Ignoring the voice? Not possible, Prompto thinks, and so there’s nothing else to do but obey -- she gasps herself slowly, painfully, down into some kind of quiet and some kind of steady, and then she tries to look at her kind and worn support.

At the very least, she needs to remind herself that she’s human, human enough to say something that might sound like _thank you_.

At the very least, she needs to apologize -- for so many things. Her weakness. The headache that’s pounding stronger and stronger somewhere behind her eyes. Damp wet sticky salt that makes her cheek stick to the material beneath it, something like leather, warm and only a little cracking around the edges, and -- there’s gold, too, now that she’s actually breathing and her eyes are starting to clear a little -- there’s still so much gunk and grit in the corners and it takes her too much effort to raise her hand and curl it into a fist, and to scrub her knuckles over her face -- 

Golden chains, wide, and leading down to the weight of some kind of round pendant. The whole thing might be catching warmth from its wearer, and passing it on to her. 

Maybe she’s passing her own warmth into the chains, too, into the pendant -- whatever little she has, when she’s still shivering and not just because everything has left her cold.

The more she can sit more or less upright, the more she can see of the pendant: and she catches a glimpse of a polished dome of gleaming black -- some kind of stone material -- and the black is shot through with flashes and sparks of fiery reds and oranges, with the stray fleck of purple, deeper for the flame-like colors surrounding it -- 

And it’s a surprise, and it isn’t, when Prompto can finally get her eyes cleared and focusing and she finds herself looking into the worn, weary, kind face of Aulea Lucis Caelum.

Close by. Concerned. Shadows beneath the perfect sharp wings of her eyeliner, the stray bits of gray in her beautiful arched eyebrows, still visible, like the lines framing the pronounced downturn of her mouth.

Aulea Lucis Caelum, here.

Here in the place that isn’t the Citadel, or the fortress of the district that surrounds it -- here in this place that is nowhere near protected or safe or even fit to live in, considering the all-but-falling apart bedding and -- in the sudden dizzying rush of protective feelings Prompto reaches for the guns that she’s no longer carrying, the missing weights of her rifles -- the one she’d taken apart and the one that she’d claimed for her own -- she kicks away from Aulea, but only to try and swing her legs over the edge of the bed and stand over her, because Aulea needs a shield like she needs a wall to stand behind and aim from around its edge and Prompto isn’t that shield, isn’t that wall, but she _is_ one more body to stand between Aulea and all of her enemies -- 

And in trying to get to her feet she catches herself in the tangle of her blankets and Prompto -- falls, lands with all of her weight on one knee, and she -- howls -- 

Arms around her once again and she sobs, humiliated, tries to push away and she can’t, she can’t -- 

“Steady.”

Not a word that she’ll ever use to describe herself, at least without any guns in her hands: but for Aulea she’ll try, even if she’s crying, even if the pain in her knee sharpens and the dull grinding ache in all of the rest of her nerves grows teeth and claws. 

“You’re safe.”

“Never,” she mutters. “And you’re not safe around me. You -- need to get out of here, you need to get back to the Citadel -- ”

“Safe,” she hears Aulea say. “And do you know what that means?”

Prompto blinks.

Looks up.

The words had been so quiet.

And she doesn’t know what she’s expecting, on the face of this woman -- her Donna -- but whatever it is, it isn’t this almost-sadness, it isn’t this almost-mourning.

It isn’t the half-knowing smile, either, or Aulea tilting her head at her, in a way that almost makes Prompto think she’s trying to get her to pay attention.

“Because I don’t know what that word means any more. Haven’t, for a long time.”

The story. That night of the story, of talking about a choice on the borders of Insomnia, caught on the nails of the need to run.

“Donna,” Prompto begins. She swallows, and makes herself say the name, too. “Aulea.”

The smile broadens, just a little. “Prompto. Welcome back to the land of the living.”

“For what it’s worth,” she mutters, almost on reflex.

“For what it’s worth, yes. Are you all right?”

“No. I don’t know. Does it matter?” she asks. “Why are you here? Why are you talking to me? Why are you putting yourself in danger for me?”

Shrug, elegant, and the quiet rasping rattle of golden chains on the move. “Everyone forgets,” she sighs, or at least the words sound halfway like a sigh. “Why am I not surprised -- I suppose I’ll simply have to remind you, as well. You made a promise to me, did you not? You made a promise to Noctis.”

That last -- it isn’t a question. It never was. 

And even when the mere mention of Noctis makes her heart lurch -- she nods, and bites her lip.

“I know you remember your promises to her, and to me. But do you remember Noctis’s promise? Do you remember mine? Do you remember the promises we gave you in return?”

She blinks, then, feeling her thoughts go slow and slogging.

And Aulea only shakes her head, a little. “We did, you know. We lead you. And we back you up. Which is what I’m doing right now: I’m your backup, Prompto, and I’m Noctis’s.”

Again that lurch in her heart. “Noctis. You’re backing her up. Wait, she -- she’s all right?”

“Yes,” and that’s the other voice, low and quiet and cold like winter’s heart, and Prompto’s hands clench into fists entirely without her willing them so.

The voice that had been asking her if she’d been all right -- but so, so icy then, and still grave now. 

Aulea’s hands, covering hers, briefly. 

Distracting her. 

“I’ll say it again, Prompto. I’m your backup. So -- be easy. Or -- don’t be afraid of me.”

“It’s not you I’m afraid of,” she says, compelled again into honesty by Aulea’s piercing glance. “I’m afraid of -- everything. I’m afraid of me.”

“I don’t fear you at all,” she hears Aulea say.

“Why?”

“Can you have this conversation somewhere else, if she is capable of having it?”

And the bed creaks, warningly, as Aulea rises slow and deliberate. As she turns toward the other voice, the man who’d spoken, vaguely familiar: Prompto takes in the too-broad shoulders, the cold eyes, the brows pulled into a nearly straight line. “Cor,” Aulea says. “You don’t get to dictate anything like that right now. You heard your -- your medic. And what are you doing here anyway? Why are you scaring my people? Don’t you have an actual job to do?”

Cor?

“I do have a job to do here and you know it. You know you’re in my way right now: you and your daughter. And I wouldn’t even bother except that I’m also running out of time here -- Donna.”

Prompto shivers and bristles all at once: coming from him, the title sounds almost, almost like a too-polite word, and in its own way like a terrible obscenity. 

“Time?” Aulea is saying. Mocking edge in that one word, sharper than all the knives in the world, Prompto thinks. “And who is wasting your time now? Last I heard, Noctis had taken that -- piece of garbage -- off your hands. Which means -- the reverse is true. It’s you standing in her way now, in ours.”

“A situation with which I am entirely familiar. So I repeat myself, from all those other times: Noctis has no right to take Caligo in hand. I apprehended him in the course of committing a crime. Not just the immediate one -- ” He’s glancing in her direction and -- Prompto feels the traitorous rush of fear in her body, heating up her face, making her feel about an inch tall. 

It takes all she has to keep her hands down, and not throw them up to hide her face once again.

She makes herself stare at Aulea’s shoulder instead, hoping against hope to remain steady, to stay where she is, and not -- bolt.

(Where would she go, where would they find her, who would find her, if she ran -- would Noctis look for her, if she ran?)

Cor is still talking, clipped words, rough. “ -- I know what it means for your daughter to go looking for a veil, Aulea. I think the entire world might know by now what that means.”

“And what makes you think I care about what the world thinks? What makes you think I care about what happens to you, if you should get between Noctis and a veil?” is the response, and it only _sounds_ like lilting, only sounds like sweet light. 

“I do not presume to do such a thing. But it isn’t within her -- rights -- to deal with Caligo. She shouldn’t even be in the same place as he is, considering -- ”

“Well that’s a surprise.” Here Aulea’s voice drops right down to almost match Cor’s, menacing, growling. “So you do know what’s coming. And you understand why. And -- knowing all of that -- you’d still presume to stand in her way? You’d still try to stop her when -- I’m right here as you can see, I’ve no wish to impede her -- what part of -- my daughter means to do what she does best -- don’t you understand?”

“She has no right.”

“Not even when -- that thing harmed someone who is under her protection, and mine?” This time Aulea seems to interrupt herself to -- scoff. “Knowing that, knowing the situation, do you honestly think she’s going to -- change her course?”

Blink, blink, and Prompto sucks in her breath as she watches Cor’s face go drawn and tight. 

“This was a waste of my time,” she hears him say, and then he’s executing a sharp turn, he’s walking away, and -- 

“Thanks for looking after Prompto,” she hears Aulea say. Is she actually laughing? Laughter, low, too dark by far, that sends shivers down her spine. “By which I mean, of course, that you’ve done no such thing.”

The speed with which Cor returns really does have Prompto scrambling out of the bed -- the speed with which he bears back down upon Aulea, mouth finally twisting in anger. “Must you do this every single time? Must you -- impose your insolence upon me, personally? I did what I could, under the circumstances. I have done what I can -- ”

“You haven’t learned a damn thing that’s new, is the problem,” Aulea snaps, just as Prompto steels herself to wade into the middle of the two of them, whatever argument this is, whatever issue this is that is none of her own damn business even if her mind is telling her that _she’s_ the actual issue. “You couldn’t spare a moment to be human? You couldn’t spare a moment to be -- ”

Whatever word it is that Aulea’s about to hurl at Cor, Prompto doesn’t want to hear it -- and she forces herself into the space between them.

Even if she can’t meet their eyes. 

Even if she still thinks she’s gone the wrong way, and she needs to be curled up in the corner, in the grip of her fears, in the grip of her despair. 

“Prompto,” she hears Aulea say.

Touch of a cool hand, of the weight of golden rings, on her shoulder. 

And the fear that’s been festering in the back of Prompto’s mind all along bursts out of her: “I -- Noctis, and a veil, and Caligo -- what is she planning to do to him, please, you have to tell me, Donna, you have to -- I have to stop her -- ”

“Does he represent a danger to Noctis.” Not a question, either, as most of Cor’s words seem to be. 

“Yes,” Prompto manages to choke out, because she can’t catch her breath for the fresh outbreak of her shivers. “He -- he nearly killed me, he’s going to kill her, if, if -- ”

“He won’t,” and the conviction in that voice shocks her.

Makes her look towards Cor. “How do you know -- ”

“We’ve -- rules for that,” he says, cold words, leaving her confused. 

“What?”

“I was there; I saw what he did to you. I only apologize that I didn’t understand what he was going to do, until you had already been harmed. What I mean to say is -- we’re treating him as actively hostile, and actively dangerous -- ”

“Oh now you do,” she thinks she hears Aulea mutter. 

“I saw to it that he was completely subdued and neutralized,” Cor is saying. “Strip-search. Cavity search. I haven’t seen fit to give him his clothes back, either, or his dignity -- and he’ll remain that way for however long he chooses to remain uncooperative -- and that is why I have been insistent that Noctis leave him be -- ”

“Because my daughter turning him into a smear of blood and bones against some crumbling wall is a terrible thing?” Aulea says, and Prompto doesn’t freeze, she doesn’t -- although she does brace herself with a shaky hand, against the nearest piece of wall she can find. 

“What is the alternative?” Cor asks.

“The alternative is for Ardyn Izunia to get his hands on the man again.”

Prompto can’t help but wince, can’t help but shiver, but she’s sickeningly familiar with the feeling, she already knows that hot swoop of loathing that hooks into her gut, and so she stays mostly upright, she doesn’t sway into the wall.

What terrifies her is the way Cor seems to almost step back from Aulea’s words.

If she didn’t know any better, she’d say he almost looks fearful right now.

“I’m not saying you’re absolutely going to get attacked,” Aulea is saying. “I wouldn’t wish that on you. But you would do well to think of what would happen to Caligo, if he were ever to find his way back to the Izunia ranks. Think about it very, very hard, Cor, and consider: who would you rather have at him? The Izunias, or Noctis?”

“If you’re trying to convince me to look the other way,” Cor begins, but it takes him too long to start talking again, Prompto thinks.

Shake of Aulea’s head, vehement. “I’m doing no such thing, Cor. I’m stating the facts. And honestly, am I really telling you something that you don’t already know?”

“I know that it would be a poor fate indeed to abandon that man to, were we to turn him loose onto the streets again. On the other hand: your daughter, who is also known for cruelty, wants to -- speak with him. One can only wonder what she’ll wind up doing, before the conversation takes place, and after.”

“She knows how to leave people alive!”

And Prompto chokes, again, on the memory of the drug, on the memory of all those nights of red, and she really does turn away -- the sound that tears out of her hurts, and she falls to her knees -- 

“What are you _doing_?”

Familiar voice, beautiful voice, but Prompto wants to hide from it -- she whimpers, she hides her face -- 

Arms wrapping around her, and she sobs out loud and presses closer, the scent of Noctis filling her up -- and how she finds the words, how she finds the strength, she doesn’t know -- but she manages to say it, in a broken whisper: “Noctis we need to talk.”

“Alone?” But Noctis doesn’t even let her answer: all Prompto hears is, “Be right back.”

She’s expecting Noctis to move her somewhere else.

All she hears is the sound of the door into the room closing.

All she feels is the presence of Noctis, her arms and her voice and her mouth moving against her cheek: “Prompto. Gods I’m glad you’re awake. I was so worried for you. I -- I think, I do, I need to apologize to you -- ”

She blinks, and pulls back.

Noctis and her disheveled hair, the grit in the corners of her eyes. Bruises on her fists, on her knuckles, where Noctis’s hands are holding on to her, cupped around her chin and shaking, just a little, just enough that she can actually feel it, and Prompto can’t smile, but she can try, and say: “I’m sorry, too. I should have gotten back on the radio and told you what I was doing. I should have let you know -- ”

“I should have protected you better, I should have gotten to you sooner -- ”

“Noctis,” she says, as fear grips her again, urgency in her as she tries to shake her, as gently as she can manage. “Noct. Listen to me. I -- I know you want to talk to Caligo, you want to -- what do you need to know? What I know about him, I’ll tell you now -- ”

“Of course, Prom, I need you to tell me these things but -- it isn’t just about wanting to kick his ass. You know that. That’s all I want to do, that’s all I can stand to do -- I can’t face the thought of being in the same room as someone like that -- ”

“You don’t know the half of it,” she says, the last word twisting into a sob -- she catches the barest flash of fear in Noctis’s eyes, before she covers her own, before she hangs her head. “If you want to kill him, if you want to kick his ass -- Noct, don’t do it for me. Do it for -- for my friend Loqi. Do it for everyone else he destroyed with all the things he created. All the things he was in on, that he helped with.”

Deep breath. Full-body shudder. 

“The red drug,” she mutters. “The -- the thing. I told the others about it, I couldn’t bring myself to tell you about it, I didn’t want you to look at me and see a monster because that, that was what I was going to become, it was just going to take me a long time,” and she describes Loqi, describes the guardians of the blue pearl necklace. The lack of emotions, the lack of inhibitions and affect, the monstrous physical strength. 

“Fuck, Prom.”

“That’s not the only thing,” she says, and she has to breathe for a minute, hard and forced-slow. Impossible to find the distance between her thoughts and her fears so she can put the words together, so Noctis will understand. “The other drug -- I, Noctis? I hated the red drug every day I had to take it. I hated every time I was given the pure stuff. I hated it because I still recognized myself in the mirror every time I took it. They were going to take a long, long time before turning me into, into a monster just like them. Something that just obeyed them. Their pretty little sex doll -- ”

“Don’t say that, please -- ”

“I hated the red stuff but, but the other thing, Noctis I hate it even more _Noctis I lost my mind,_ ” she sobs, and she pulls away from the shelter of Noctis’s arms. “I, Noctis, I lost the connection between my mind and my body, that’s what the other drug did to me. I, fuck, when I was still a prisoner I wanted that. I wanted to separate those two things, I thought that it would be a good thing to be able to dissociate completely, they could do whatever they wanted to my body and I wouldn’t be able to think about caring, I wouldn’t be able to think about giving a damn about the people who were just -- using my body after all.

“But, but, I actually lost the connection because of the other drug and -- Noctis, Noctis, I can’t even trust myself anymore -- how do I know what’s real now? How do I know your mom wasn’t just here? How do I know Cor is real, how do I know _you’re_ real? That thing, that other drug, what the fuck was it, why would Caligo make it, why would they want to give that kind of drug to people? I, I don’t know if I was even alive or dead, I lost the connection, I -- ”

Hands on her shoulders, shaking her, hard enough for her teeth to rattle and clack together and her words stop in a searing flash of pain -- she’s bitten into her tongue and it hurts, it hurts, she chokes on a sob -- 

“Look at me. Prompto?”

Second shake, and that jars her tongue some more, and she gasps and opens her eyes -- still tight in the corners from her fresh sobs -- and there’s nothing but understanding in Noctis’s face. The lines around her mouth only echo the fact that she’s pressed her lips gently together. “Do I look real to you?”

“I -- don’t know -- ”

“That’s okay. I’ll talk to you until you believe me. Starting with -- ” Noctis blushes, actually blushes -- Prompto can see the red blooming in her cheeks, dull strange shade that only emphasizes the sallowness of her skin. “I said I wanted to apologize to you. I’ll tell you why. I -- I haven’t been around for you a lot, have I? I mean I said I wanted to be with you and then I wasn’t with you -- ”

“You said things were complicated,” Prompto mutters. “If that’s what you mean by complicated, you not being around, I can deal with that. So long as you’re still -- good, when I can see you, in the rare moments -- ”

Wince, and a hard shake of the head. “You had to get there right from the starting line, now I’m playing catch-up again, and that’s not fair to you at all, is it? Prompto,” and the hands come back to her shoulders, gentle firm grip. “I can’t, I can’t keep on treating you the way I have. I can’t hinge all my emotions on you. I can’t put you on a pedestal. I don’t want to be that kind of all-take-and-no-give lover, really I ought to know better, I know a little of what that’s like and yet I’m doing exactly that to you. Even if I don’t mean to. Even if I don’t want to, that’s still what’s happening between us, and I’m sorry it took me so long to get there, I’m sorry Ignis had to yell at me and tell me about the decisions you’ve made before I could understand what I was doing. I’m -- I don’t want to be the one who holds you back. 

“I just want to hold you, okay, I don’t know about anything else I can do for you but _please_ let me in, Prom, let me help you, let me be with you, tell me how you want me to be with you. And not -- not a missing lover, I don’t want to be that to you.”

Too many words, too many edges in the words, and she thinks she can imagine the slashes and the wounds Noctis has left in herself, leaving herself vulnerable.

Maybe this is real. Maybe this is the real Noctis. Maybe it’s not the first time she’s seen the haunted eyes behind her smirk -- the haunted eyes that almost, almost look familiar, but -- this is still Noctis, with the spark of power, with the bloodthirsty flash of her teeth.

This is the Noctis of that first night, holding a gun to her head. 

And that’s the Noctis she trusted.

She lets herself lean in, then: lets herself sag into Noctis.

“Still shaking,” she hears Noctis say, even as they’re trying to pick each other up from the floor. “Can you tell me?”

“Caligo,” she says. “The other thing about him.”

“What about him,” and she’s almost certain she hears the snarl in Noctis’s words. 

“Other than the part where he was making drugs -- he was, is, also still the guy who’s the closest to an actual doctor that Ardyn has. Had.”

Hand around hers, tightening, only for a moment. “The cancer.”

“Only way we’ll be able to find the details.”

“I don’t want to know,” and Noctis really does sigh, in the next instant. “I don’t want to know because I don’t fucking care. But -- information. Knowing this, knowing what’s killing the bastard, that’s something we can use.” Another pause, during which Noctis steps away -- and Prompto only follows her, and doesn’t attempt to retake her hand. “So -- I want a specific set of answers. I need him to break an oath. Right? I need him to talk enough that he’ll reveal -- those secrets.”

“Considering what he’s already done, I wouldn’t consider him a -- medical doctor anymore,” and now the door is opening, revealing Aulea -- and a silent, glowering Gladio standing next to her. 

“How long have you been there?” Prompto hears Noctis ask.

“Is that relevant?”

“No,” Noctis says, after a moment. 

When she goes to her mother, Prompto hangs back -- until Aulea herself beckons her closer, and then she still hesitates before stepping to Noctis’s side. 

“Better. You stand together, and you have better odds of surviving together,” she hears Aulea say.

“Not for this,” Noctis mutters. 

“I know it’s a distasteful thing you need to do, Noctis -- but I wouldn’t be urging you to do it if it wasn’t important.”

“I know it’s important, mother, I’m just -- everyone thinks I have a fucking cast-iron stomach for these things, is all.”

“Not me,” and Gladio actually smirks when Prompto shoots him a glance.

“He’s not going to be afraid of me, is he,” Noctis says next. “Veil or not.”

“Wear it anyway,” she hears Aulea say. “It will still be helpful.”

“If I can find one.”

The idea comes to her, then, and it makes hatred race burning through her veins, hotter than razors, more painful than crashing. 

And Noctis, that’s Noctis turning towards her, pale with concern suddenly. “Prompto?”

“Even the people in your ranks, they’re afraid of you when you put a veil on,” she says, and she puts her arms around herself, and it feels strange because it feels like stepping in front of a primed and loaded and zeroed sniper rifle -- the more so when she feels that maybe she prepared the rifle herself. “I’m not going to ask you how many people you’ve killed that way.”

“Better not.” Noctis is still meeting her eyes. “But?”

“Caligo: does he know if I’m alive or dead?”

Blank looks from mother and daughter.

A scrape of a footstep in the corridor.

“He thinks he killed you,” and that shadow, long and looming, can only belong to Cor. “He seemed proud of it. Perhaps he thought he had given you a large enough dose that it should have been instantly fatal.”

“Again with the -- real and not-real,” and Prompto’s not surprised, not really, even if the words still make her shudder, even if the very recent memory of coming completely undone is still a weight on her shoulders. 

“Prompto: seriously?”

But Noctis looks -- not skeptical, not dismissive. 

Just worried. 

“I’ll back you up,” she says.

Cold dark chuckle, is what she hears first, in response. “Don’t hate me if I wind up killing him right in front of you.”

She shakes her head. “I’ll cheer you on if you like. But -- let me go in and scare the shit out of him.”

In the silence she sees: Gladio’s nod, and Aulea’s raised eyebrow, and the tightening line of Cor’s mouth.

And in the silence she sees Noctis coming closer, closer -- close enough to kiss, but that’s not what happens. 

What happens is Noctis whispering one word against her mouth.

And Prompto nods, and repeats the word back to her.

“Together.”


	14. Chapter 14

“Why don’t you stay here a while, stay here a while, stay with me -- ”

Words, but not entirely spoken. Words rising and falling. Words that make her think of notes, of pitches, but wandering strangely, almost lurching and almost all over the place -- drunken-like rambling, tune that falls in and out of her understanding. Is it a song of some kind, just not -- at its best? Is it something that maybe she’s heard before, something that maybe had been playing in the distant background seconds and minutes and hours of her handcuffed nights? Or does it go further than that -- is it something that they’d played on a radio station, or on the small stage of a small empty bar, or on an empty street corner, or in a small soulless room, in some other life that she might have had?

Rambling words, but even if every single one of them were as unsteady as these, she still wants to get to her feet and follow them, if they can all be followed, if they can all be found. She wants to wander after the song, after the singer, after that weirdly shipwrecked rhythm -- and for all its odd rolling and pitching the song is a comfort to her.

Almost as much a comfort as the feeling, distant, muted, of hands in her hair. Soothing steady short strokes, regular, methodical, seeming to move from left to right and then back again, back and forth over the curve of her head. Scrape of blunt nails over her scalp, everything to help her breathe, nothing to make her think of things like -- hunting, hurting, maiming.

That’s -- a word, she thinks, now, the song still drunkenly pitching, if receding, though she still thinks she wants to hum along. 

Maiming, to leave permanent hurts, permanent damage, that seems to be the word that describes her, in body and in spirit. The word for her. It describes her. The thin dark line around her wrist, raggedly left behind by steel: that’s something she’ll never be rid of. That’s her scar on her skin and it will never go away. The holes and the gaps in her mind where she can’t remember earlier days: and where would she even start with looking for the missing pieces? How is she ever going to be able to find those memories again? The grains of black stuff embedded into the backs of her hands, the outsides of her thumbs: those are tiny scars in her, too, burned in. 

Scarred, chained, broken: that’s her, and she can never forget it, and not even the strange song, not even the hands in her hair, can chase all the pain away. Kind, the song and the touch alike, and they can only do so much to heal. They can’t repair all the damage that’s been done and that’s why -- that’s why she’s maimed. 

And oh, if only she had the words. If only she could curse herself properly. She’s not making sense but what else is new? Her thoughts loop and knot and tangle and snarl, and they’re all knives, sharp and dull alike. They pierce the edges of her worn mind, they prick at her eyes -- and that’s how she knows she’s crying again. Useless, useless, why is she crying, what will crying do, what will crying change? When, when will her tears ever run dry? When will these sobs stop haunting her with every heave of her breath in her chest? When will she ever stop waking up to the wail that’s caught in the back of her throat, the scream for mercy that doesn’t exist?

Does she even deserve mercy?

And that makes her pull her hands up -- oh, she can control them after all, she can move after all, on her own, independent of the song that she had been wanting to lose herself in -- she claps her hands over her mouth and she can still hear herself choking, fighting to breathe -- and the hands in her hair stop.

“Oh -- oh, hush now, hush, come here -- it’s all right.”

Arms, arms around her, gentle and strong and slender, bright yellow sleeves that she can’t quite understand. Hands wrapped in a sick-white film of some kind -- the fingertips stained in vivid copper-flame reds. 

She can’t think about those colors when she’s being made to move -- but she’s also and suddenly coming to rest, and she’s wrapped in softness and warmth. Wrapped in a voice, quiet and compelling: “Breathe, all right? Breathe. How does he do it -- I never pay attention to him. Breathe in, three, four, five; breathe out, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven.”

One voice that had been playing fast and loose with the song -- the same voice, steady now, no longer singing, no longer shipwrecked, but still something she wants to listen to. Maybe needs to listen to, to follow that cadence, that count, air moving into her lungs and out of them. 

“Good, keep going, you need to keep going. Breathe with me, Prompto.”

Familiar name.

It’s her name.

Why does she keep losing track of her own name?

She looks up, and there’s a movement that copies her -- oh, not just a copy, then. It’s her reflection -- there she is in a mirror, what is she doing in front of a mirror?

Red-dye stains on the very outer edges of her forehead, her temples, just around her ears, which slowly makes sense, slowly resolves into blonde hair being covered up once again. Blonde hair buried in red, and -- there’s someone else in the mirror with her.

A half-smile. Sweet and worried. A different shade of gold, wild-ruffle curls peeking out from beneath the edges of a peach-and-gray cap. The yellow sleeves, the white-wrapped hands, the too-wide off-center collar that threatens to dangle right off her shoulder. 

She knows who this is: the voice, the hair, the accent that had been on the words, and she says the name, shaky and small. “Cindy.”

“That’s me. You know where you are?”

“I -- I think?” 

Left and right are reversed in the mirror, naturally, but -- she can resolve the room if she looks at the details. If she looks at the things that catch her eye -- and there are many of those, but mostly unfamiliar to her. Printouts and posters in almost-neat frames, crowded on the section of wall adjacent to the bed. She thinks she sees the schematics for her own sniper rifle in that group, but what is it doing between a glossy photograph of a sleek fighter-jet and a scribbled-on map of the Citadel district? 

She tears her eyes away from that wall, and keeps on looking, and her gaze lands on the long bank of desks and tables running along the nearer side of the room. Coils of wire, unlabeled cans, squat black boxes bristling with color-coded handles that stick out at the corners. A jigsaw puzzle, half-completed, takes up one surface all on its own, and over it looms the long furled hook-shape of a model of a bird of prey.

Those tables end next to the door into this suite -- and in the corner, on the other side of that door, is a heap of ballistic fabric, web-straps, and a squared-off slab of something that she thinks might be ceramic, and that’s where she sighs and she shivers.

The mirror shows her the reflection of Cindy glancing in that direction, and then making a knowing, wry face. “Well, we are at war.”

“Yes. I don’t need reminding of that.”

“No, I expect you don’t. At least -- thanks to you and to Noctis, we’re making progress.”

She blinks.

And the last few nights flood in on her and she wants to hide for the shame of it, the blood and the screams of that night.

She opens her hands again and almost expects to see dirt still crusted under her fingernails, although -- there’s none to be found. Not on her actual hands, not in their reflections in Cindy’s mirror. 

But the smell of the earth -- the weight of shifting earth to a width and a depth that would fit the remains of a broken bleeding bag of bones -- the stain on that bag, the last drops of blood and bile and whatever else had come out of Caligo, after Noctis had finished with him -- she’s still carrying all of that around, and not even the acrid fug of dye settling once again into her hair and into her scalp can overpower it.

She closes her hands into fists, opens them -- repeats, repeats, waiting for the pain and -- there, the pinched nerve, the grinding joint, the scored-in line of white nervelessness over one of her gunpowder burns. 

“Why are you still thinking about it?”

Cindy, next to her: sitting upright, and sipping from a cup. Delicate flowers of blue and white fading into the green and gold of its glaze. 

“It’s not the grave,” she says, a little too suddenly, and she shrugs when Cindy raises an eyebrow at her. “That’s only the first thing I remember. The rest, the rest, I don’t know -- what hasn’t Noctis already told you?” She waves in the direction of the armor next to the door. “If you have that there, ready, waiting -- ”

“ -- then I’m a soldier, just like you,” Cindy says, finishing off the sentence. “Then I’m at war, just like you. Noctis hasn’t told me anything else, she told me the thing you were there for and that was it.”

“And you’re asking me to tell you things now.”

Shake of that head. “No. We’re not here for that if that’s not something you want to do.”

Alarm, screeching, on the console beneath the mirror -- it’s coming from a phone, too -- and Cindy is humming again, and now Prompto can hear how tuneless she really is, and she doesn’t say a word.

“Hold still,” she hears Cindy say as she approaches again, so Prompto does, and she listens to that not-quite-musical murmur: and she also wants to disobey that gentle order. Wants to recoil from the even sharper smell of the pale-yellow thing that’s being tapped into her hairline. The smell of too many chemicals, absorbing the dye so it lifts away from her skin. 

She almost wants to hold her breath for the entire time that Cindy’s cleaning up -- not possible, and she knows it, and she holds up a hand, and tries to cough quickly and sharply to get it out of the way. 

“Just a little longer and then you can wash up some.”

“Thank you,” Prompto says, softly. “For putting up with me. With this.”

“It’s not putting up with you to do this,” she hears Cindy say, after the mirror shows her squinting at something next to her ear. “This’s my kind of work.”

“You have so many other things to do.”

“Because I have too much time on my hands now that we’re -- waiting and waiting and waiting, and so what else is new?”

Prompto sighs. “Everything. At least to me it is.”

Cindy’s gloved hands go still for only a moment -- only a moment, and then she starts muttering to herself and even when she’s so close the words are hard to make out.

“Sorry.”

“Not about you,” is the response, and honestly, that’s surprising. 

As are the next words: “Feels like I should be saying that.”

“Cindy. What?”

“Hold on to that, let me just -- ”

She tilts her head at a prod from Cindy’s finger; there’s a brief sharp stinging in her scalp near the top of her head, and then Cindy is walking towards another corner of the room and shucking her thoroughly stained gloves, discarding them.

“You can move now, it’s all right, your hair’s done.”

“What are you apologizing to me for?” she asks.

“Drink this,” and Cindy is pushing a glass of water at her.

She does, and then she’s watching Cindy take off some of her layers. Beneath the shirt is a tunic of gray material, and a wide blue belt. Rainbow-striped patches clustered on the cut-off sleeves, shapes like circles and stars scattered. Shorts showing through the slits in the bottom of the tunic, the same heathered colors. 

Gray that contrasts against the peach of the blankets on the bed, that Cindy collapses onto with a sigh. “You’re a fast learner, you know that,” she says.

Prompto blinks, thrown again. “Lost now.”

“I’m -- trying to tell you why I was apologizing.” That drawl stops and starts. “And the reason for that is -- just because I forget. Noctis and Iris and I, we sit down to talk about strategies, about things we need to do in case we need to go out and do something stupid, and -- we know where to put you, most of the time, and we learned to do that in a very short amount of time. How did we even do that? Because you learned how to work around us, so quickly. We didn’t have to ask you, we didn’t even talk about asking you. You learned how to watch Noctis’s back and that’s really what we’re all here for. But you, you did it and no one was even expecting you to do it. When you came to us, when Noctis brought you here, the only thing I thought was, you looked lost, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” and Prompto wants to hide her face, and there’s nothing to do that with, so she just swallows anything else she might have said. So she just sits on her hands. 

“You didn’t -- want to recover from anything. What was the word that Iris used? You didn’t want to convalesce. Even though you needed to, she said. You learned to be a soldier instead and you were, you are, as fast as Ignis ever was, and he had years to learn. Why do I forget that?”

“Why do you even have to think of it,” Prompto says, quietly. “I try not to. I tell myself everything was nightmares and shit like that.”

“Nightmares, yes,” she hears Cindy say. “But I feel like my own mama would not be happy if I forgot, if we forgot, what you’re still doing.”

She feels herself go entirely braced and stiff and rigid. “Which is?”

Cindy looks up, and shakes her head. “See, you’re doing it. You’re scared I’ll say something to hurt you. I’m scared I’ll do that. What you’re doing is adapting. You’re recovering, you’re changing to be one of us, but -- we don’t have the right to expect you to change, you see?”

“I’d rather be a soldier than a doll,” she says, and maybe she bares her teeth because she hates that last word with a passion.

“True that. And I’m sorry, I still think of you as somewhere in between. Nothing to do with you, everything to do with me.”

“Oh,” she says, after a long moment. “I -- I didn’t know you were thinking that.”

“No harm if I hadn’t said it out loud,” she hears Cindy say. “But I was acting like it earlier. I felt like I owed you something true. Mama raised me better, I promise, I just need to remember.”

“Okay. I -- what do I say, Cindy? Forgiven, or something like that?”

“That will probably do. And promise me you’ll maybe kick my ass around if I make the same mistake again.”

“Am I even allowed to do that?”

She sees Cindy laugh a little, and shake her head, and then -- there’s a knock on the door.

“Come in,” is what Cindy says instead.

“Open a damn window, it smells funny in here -- oh, Prompto, is it you, is that why -- ?”

“Use your words, Noctis,” and she thinks Cindy is laughing again.

But she just reaches out to the sleeve of Noctis’s oversized jumper. Nubs and puffs of uneven yarn, softer than clouds beneath her fingertips, that she follows down to the cuffs that overhang Noctis’s hands entirely. 

“What the hell is this,” she asks. “So much for running warm -- or is it that cold out there? What were you even doing in the cold?”

Long sharp sigh, that makes her snap her eyes back up to the new lines of strain around those midnight-colored eyes. “I can’t tell you any of it, or all of it, because none of it is final, not yet. No need for you to worry. Just been talking to people, is all.”

She knows she comes to attention, just as Cindy does, if the rustle of the sheets is any indication. “Nothing bad, I would hope so,” and that drawl, too, has blade-edges in it.

“I just said: nothing for now. No fires to put out anyway. Not tonight, but -- soon, it will have to be soon. Later might be too late.”

“What,” Prompto begins. 

“I came to find you, to explain something to you that I _could_ explain,” Noctis says, then. “I mean, if you’re done here.”

“I reek.”

She almost laughs when Noctis makes a face. “You do. So -- go clean up, and I’ll see you outside my rooms.”

She nods, but before she can turn away and go, she -- gives in to the impulse to go to Cindy, and hold out her hand. “Forget what I said earlier. There’s nothing to forgive,” she says. “You didn’t do anything wrong.”

“Can’t forget again -- but I’ll stop apologizing,” is the gentle response -- followed up by a laugh. “Now get out of here, I’ll send Noct off.”

She thinks she runs past -- closed doors, and open ones. A game of cards in progress, that she only catches a glimpse of. A shape that could have been Ignis, hand outstretched towards a grand piano. Crowe, or someone who runs with Crowe, patrolling a corridor.

There’re instructions to follow, to get rid of the smell of the dye on her skin, but she’s not sure she follows all of them, because she’s distracted. She thinks of Noctis all bundled up in such an odd way, and decides on layers of long sleeves. Decides on the black frock coat and for a moment wishes she had the time to remove all the silver bits, and then she’s hurrying out the door again, she’s hitting the call button on one of the elevators -- 

The doors open on that one and -- the same jumper, the same blue eyes, the same Noctis. 

“You’re a surprise,” Prompto says, and she steps into the cabin. Watches as Noctis hits a button for a lower floor. “I’m guessing where we’re going -- that’s a surprise too.”

“Not really. I wanted to show you my favorite library, I mean it’s still a library even though it’s lower down,” is the quiet response.

Hand slipping into hers, holding on gently, so familiar.

The same hand that had found her in a heap of overturned earth and scattered stones, that had helped her roll a silent sack of dead flesh into a hole in the earth. The same hand that had led her back here, and she hadn’t resisted at all.

She had trusted: and now they’re here.

“I have just one question,” she asks, long after they’ve exited the elevator.

The library that Noctis has brought her to -- doesn’t actually feel like one. Never mind the shelves that seem planted where they are, forests of shelves and the shadows of book-spines, the smell of old and brittle pages, the smell of worn and aged leather, fragrant dusty mellow. Never mind the immovable windows, the black paint thickly layered onto the glass, so she can’t even guess at the view that must be hidden now. Never mind the ghostly indents in the worn carpet that shifts beneath her feet and Noctis’s -- where the things that had made those indents are now, maybe they were tables and chairs and other heavy things, what’s been done to them, she doesn’t know and she can’t bring herself to care.

Not after Noctis stops and there is an honest-to-god bed in the middle of all of these shelves and shadows: okay, it only resembles the bed in Noctis’s suite because it’s the same size, and it’s got a lot of the same sheets and other soft things in it -- otherwise it looks like it isn’t even real, like it could never be real -- and she keeps thinking that way even after Noctis climbs into it and moves aside a book that’s been hidden under one of the pillows.

“Yeah?” she hears Noctis say. “What was the question?”

She doesn’t answer, dazed; she shucks her boots after she catches a glimpse of Noctis’s feet in their flower-dotted sheer socks, and sits gingerly at the foot of the bed, next to Noctis’s legs. 

“What are you doing there?”

“I said I only had one question, but -- it’s not this one, Noct.” And she gestures, helplessly. “What is this?”

“It’s a library?”

“No, I mean, bed?”

There’s not much light -- the nearest lit lamps are partly blocked by shelves -- she can only see the flush in Noctis’s cheeks as a sort of darker shadow in the slopes of her face. “Um. Not my idea. I think, and my mom doesn’t really disagree or anything, that maybe this started out as one of my dad’s hideaways. He wasn’t doing very well, near the end, before he was killed -- he’d been sick, or something, for a long time. I don’t remember what with. But he wanted to be near his books, and he didn’t always have the strength to get out of his bed. So he asked his people to build a library around him. This is one of his libraries. Didn’t much like some of his books but -- some of them I really needed to read, too, I guess? Maybe he left them for me, I don’t know.”

Prompto has to squint to read the title on the book in Noctis’s lap. “ _Conquest_?”

“I don’t do philosophy, I’d rather leave that to the Amicitias, they’re better with it than I am because they’ve all been reading it for years. Probably years. But I understand parts of this one. There are very strange stories in it.”

She thinks she can take a guess at -- why. “You brought me here to tell me something, and you didn’t want anyone else to hear it -- something from that book?”

“What? No!” Noctis is pulling at her, and she’s only too happy to go: and she ends up partly in Noctis’s lap, and partly on the bed, and Noctis is leaning into her, hands in her jacket and fitted into the spaces between her ribcage and her waist.

She can’t fight the impulse to pull Noctis closer, either, and she quickly distracts herself with kissing the delicate curve of her ear, and the warmth of her temple.

Somehow things progress to the point where she blinks, and she finds herself flat on her back and Noctis is nuzzling at her throat, and she laughs a little -- it feels like she hasn’t laughed in days -- 

“That’s a good sound, I feel like I did something right there,” she hears Noctis say, around a similarly quiet chuckle. “You’re all right with all of this?”

“Except for the part where you haven’t exactly been explaining, and you said you wanted to tell me things,” she says, though she makes a face afterwards, that only the vaulted ceiling high overhead can see. “I don’t know how you can explain yourself and kiss me at the same time though.”

“Right, so let’s get it all out of the way and maybe we can get back to kissing afterwards.”

She’s not sure she doesn’t imagine the sigh that gusts against her jawline, when Noctis sits up again, and runs her hands through her hair. “I can tell you this,” she says, and Prompto wonders whether Noctis can hear the ice that seems to be forming brittle and freezing around her own words. Cold, cold, she’s gone cold but not distant: hand that catches at Prompto’s and holds on as if for dear life.

Well, Prompto feels just as badly adrift and just as badly in need of something to catch her, so she clutches back. 

“Good news, bad news,” Noctis is saying, “and it was my thing, anyway, telling the people in this family all the things, all the facts, so maybe someone can come up with a better idea, a better strategy, a better answer to a shitty question. And -- we came home with too many shitty questions, didn’t we?”

Prompto shudders and again remembers looking down at a shroud, and this time she says, quietly, “I still dream about it. I was right to -- bury him but -- the dreams, Noct, afterwards I’d dream and want to die, too. Caligo’s body in a grave but his face would change. I’d dream of burying -- your mom, or you, or even me, and -- I’d do anything to escape those dreams.”

“I heard you once,” is the equally hushed response. “I wanted to be there when I woke up.”

“Not your fault you have to go away.”

Tug on her hand -- she looks up, and Noctis shakes her head. “So you keep telling me. I can’t be okay with it.”

“I’m not either.”

“Yeah. So. Shitty questions.”

Prompto has to sigh, long and deep and shaky, and it leaves her limp. “Ardyn Izunia questions.”

“That rat bastard,” she hears Noctis mutter. “He’d be doing us a favor to drop dead now. Or to have dropped dead yesterday.” 

“He won’t oblige us,” Prompto mutters.

“No. Fuck him. But -- shitty questions, and -- Mother and I have been trying to find answers. You knew that, you tried to help -- but I don’t know if you remember that something else happened just after we came back and -- that was some long days and nights, Prom, I won’t lie. Sequestered at the top of the Citadel with Ceres and -- a few others.”

“What did you do, Noct,” and already she’s half-dreading the answer. “What did you and -- and the Donna do.”

She almost whispers Ceres’s name, too.

But Noctis is shaking her head some more. “Didn’t do anything but listen. And not to Cor, either, he was there and he wasn’t there, he didn’t even look like he wanted to be here at all but he had to be here, and he was only the messenger -- ”

“Cor Leonis was here?”

“And surly as fuck for all of it but like I said, he wasn’t here to talk to us, he’d brought us testimony instead.”

Prompto breathes, breathes, tries to understand that word. “Testimony. I know what that means. I know it has to do with -- a witness.” She thinks about it for one more moment and feels the blood go cold in her veins. “Someone else -- someone else. Somehow they got their notes out. And if Cor was only the messenger -- did they, did the witness, make it out alive? Are they okay? Is it -- someone who’s dead but they talked first? Or something. Information from inside the Izunia ranks?”

“Information, yes, but -- the witness is not dead,” and Noctis’s words make her stop again.

“What?”

“Cor Leonis has done the impossible,” and Noctis does sound like she almost admires the man. “He’s got a source, a living source, who is -- witnessing, right now. Someone who’s deep inside with the Izunias, and who the Izunias think is theirs, but -- the source is actually working for the cops.”

“Impossible,” Prompto mutters. “Impossible.”

“I know. I just said, too. Impossible except that it’s already happening. Has been for some time now.”

“Fuck,” and she’s shaking. “I -- how -- gods don’t answer that question, I don’t think I want to know. Just, just, testimony -- wait, Noct, you want to let the family know?”

“Have to,” is the answer, resolute and filled with dread. “Need to.”

“I don’t understand.” Another emotion washes through her like bitter waves, like choking grief. “I mean, I already was a witness. Wasn’t I? Okay, maybe I didn’t bring you much. So -- you want more. More information, more proof, more weapons against those assholes.”

Arms around her, and she stops, and covers her mouth. Turns her cheek into the warmth of Noctis and shame and fear burn through her, leave fresh new scars on her. 

“Prompto.”

“Yeah,” she whispers.

“We always need more information, we need every scrap of information we can get: but if you’re thinking what you gave us hasn’t been valuable, hasn’t been important -- I’ll remind you. I -- we needed what you brought to us. You know that, right?”

“But it’s terrible things I brought you.”

“Some of it was. But it was terrible because it was Ardyn doing it. It was the Izunias doing it. And you said you weren’t an Izunia.”

“I still did bad things.”

“Welcome to the family,” and she hears Noctis laugh, as bitter as the sorrow she’s tasting thick and bile-like on her tongue. “I’ll remind you of that, too. We’re the Lucis Caelums. The only ones of us who didn’t do bad shit were the ones from before this, before Insomnia, and I don’t know them and I don’t give a rat’s ass about them.” 

She shakes her head.

“I’ll say it as often as you need to hear it. I can do that for you.” And, softly, fearfully, as she’s never heard Noctis before: “If you could smell the blood, Prom. It’s in my dreams, every night.”

“Yeah, I -- I think I believe you there.”

But she still has to gather herself together before she can pick up the conversation again.

Noctis holds her, shivering but steady and present.

Eventually, she looks up. “Okay Noct. So, this thing. You’re gonna do this thing. Soon?”

“In a day or two. It will take that long for the message to get to the very ground floor. So, so while there’s still a little time -- ” Noctis is leaning over the edge of the bed, now, and Prompto can hear the sounds of a scramble, the sound of a search. “Aha. Here you are.”

Box on the sheets, dust-fluff on one corner. 

She eyes it, and then looks up at Noctis, who looks like she’s grinding her teeth. “Noct?”

“I’m scared.”

Gathering Noctis into her arms is almost a reflex at this point, she thinks, a reflex and a need.

“What I heard up there, Prompto, what we all heard up there -- you know it’s bad when Ceres has to take a moment.”

She nods, shakily. “I don’t know if I can imagine it. I don’t know if I want to.”

“You’ll know anyway. I’ll tell everyone, that’s the point of the meeting. We all agreed: we’d have to let everyone know. At this point, knowing is life and death and I want to make sure we’re all ready for either of those things. 

“And you’ll be right there with me for the whole thing, and -- that wasn’t actually the reason why I wanted to talk to you here.”

“Not more bad news, Noct, I don’t think my mind could take it,” she mutters, but she doesn’t move from the bed, and doesn’t let go of her.

“I don’t know what kind of news this is.”

But instead of offering another explanation, Noctis only passes her the box.

And it’s a small box indeed, slim lines, so very light.

Click of a lamp next to the bed, coming on, and she hadn’t even seen the shape of it in the soft darkness of the library, of the books.

Despite the warmth of that lamplight, Noctis looks -- smaller, colder, faraway -- and Prompto puts the box aside and tries to remember Cindy’s words from earlier. “You need to breathe or I’m not opening this.”

“Open that, then I can breathe,” is the response, and she makes a face, and does as she’s told.

She barely hears the sigh of Noctis over the sudden roar in her ears.

Because she knows that blue pearl all too well.

Only one pearl, and not the entire length of the necklace she’d stolen or reclaimed or ransomed. One pearl, in perfect blue: like a star, like Noctis’s eyes, and it’s been fixed into a steel-gray setting, at the blunted end of a long spike-shape in honey-colored wood -- and the other end looks almost like a weapon in its own right, needle-taper, like something she could actually drive into someone’s ear or eye or throat and kill with -- 

She almost thinks she knows what this is and she -- rakes her hand back through her hair, through the unruly waves of it that tangle past her shoulders, and she looks at Noctis, her heart marooned somewhere between hopeful and shocked and suspicious and wordlessly grateful. “I’m assuming you want me to wear this.”

“Wear it. Carry it. I don’t care _how_. But I want you to have that.” Pale, trembling, smiling Noctis. “And it’s yours, I think it would look fantastic on you, but -- I had one more request, about that.”

She knows what that one more request is. “You want me to wear it or have it or carry it where everyone can see it, and you want me to do it at -- your family meeting.”

“ _Our_ family meeting. Yeah. You wear that, because it’s yours. I’ll wear mine. After that I don’t care what you do with that thing -- you can kill me with it if you like -- ”

She starts, violently enough that she suddenly finds herself at the edge of the bed. “Fucking hells, Noctis, why would you even think I’d do such a thing?”

“Because that’s the most presumptuous thing I’ve ever done to you -- I mean you gave me those pearls and then I took one out of the strand to give back to you. Mother looked at me funny when I commissioned it -- I think she thought I was being rude, so -- she offered me other jewels, for the purpose of giving you something. 

“I said I wanted this one. I said I wanted us to share it. You and me, and those pearls.”

That does make a certain kind of sense, Prompto thinks -- 

“You have a right to that and more,” she hears Noctis say. “You have a right to me, is what I was trying to say, I think. Still presumptuous though.”

“It was presumptuous until you asked,” she says, and she turns the ornament over and over in her hand. The weight of it, and -- she thinks she can almost smell the wood, like faintly-remembered sunlight on grass. 

“And it’s presumptuous until you answer me, which, I’m sorry, I can’t even give you enough time to think about whether you’re going to accept it or not. And I can’t even give you enough time to think about wearing it in public. Or where the entire Citadel can see it.”

Hasn’t she already answered? Hasn’t she already said yes? Why is Noctis talking about -- time to think this over? She doesn’t need it. 

She wants this thing.

And she looks up, and tries to pin Noctis down with her eyes. “Teach me how to wear this.”

“Yes, oh, gods, Prompto -- ”

Noctis, surging forward, catching at her -- the fear doesn’t go away, the shadows of her nightmares don’t go away, the cold numbness of her deeds doesn’t go away -- but this is the moment, and this is the here and now, Noctis and that gift, and the meaning of her words.


	15. Chapter 15

For a moment she thinks she won’t be alone any more, or at least not for tonight, when she hears the small crowd of footsteps that she thinks might be approaching the door behind her -- the door on which she’s finally managed to turn her back, and she’s still tense, she’s still startling herself with every shift of the shadows in the quiet hiss of the climate control -- footsteps, hushed voices, debating -- 

“Oh, sorry,” and she hears an older voice, small soft startled, and then -- the footsteps are all clamoring softly away from her again.

And that means no one comes into this room. That means the card tables remain empty and the chessboard set up in the corner remains untouched and out of play. That means the bowl full of dice at the other end of this particular bar-counter remains full.

She exhales, long and slow and shivering, and for the lack of anything to do -- for the pins and needles starting to attack at her ankles and calves -- she slides off the chair that she’s been sitting on. The wood and the leather of it creaks for a few more moments after she’s stepped away, after she’s cleared it.

Slowly she moves to cross to the other side of the long mostly-still-polished bar.

Now she can lean back on it and consider -- not just the emptiness of this room, and not just the tension that continues to run pricking wires and wildfire down the nerves of her shoulders and her back -- because she’s turned her back on the door again and that still makes her queasy, she thinks, that still makes her feel like she wants to startle and look for cover somewhere -- maybe here, or maybe behind the bulk of the large table for eight in the corner, where she’d once walked past a group of Lucis Caelum soldiers and Gladio and Iris laughing and drinking and flicking playing cards at each other.

She considers: the wall that rises before her, divided into niches -- same as the other rec rooms scattered throughout this Citadel -- but here, most of those niches are empty, and there are only shapes in faint lines of dust to let her guess what the bottles in those niches must have been. 

Another mostly unused room in a skyscraper full of them, she thinks, a mostly empty skyscraper full of mostly empty rooms -- she inches further along the bar until she gets back to where she’d been sitting before, only now she’s on the other side of the bar. Tumbler in her hand, still half-full, and she takes a long slow sip of the liquid still in it. Copper in the round-bellied shape of the glass, and she thinks it’s the kind of copper that sort of glows from within, but that might also be a trick of the light.

Light that flickers, only a little, not nearly enough to make her flinch, as she drains her tumbler and hazily, slowly, considers whether she wants more.

Or does she want to try something else?

Not much else that’s here, though.

She breathes, and again she can smell the blended scents of crushed fruit and long-gone smoke that had been part of her drink. The bite of wood and the hints of ash and the rain-soaked grass, not entirely unpleasant, that stick to her back teeth. 

The alcohol lingers for a long time on her tongue, after she’s swallowed, after she’s popped a chip of ice from the bowl on the counter into her mouth. Sharp hazy sweetness on her tongue, filling her up with warmth, and normally that would have been good enough for her -- just a few mouthfuls of it and no more. 

If she happens to be drinking like this with Ignis, or with Iris, she’d linger over whatever they’d passed her to drink -- usually something like this and she doesn’t really bother to identify them, to distinguish them one from the other, but they’re the only ones she’d ever trust to pour her a drink, other than Noctis herself.

If she happens to be drinking with anyone else, she’d nurse her bottle, that she’d picked out and opened with her own two hands, and carefully, politely refuse after the third or fourth refill. Maybe it’s the old fears still catching her around the throat, fingers in a stranglehold, loose at first and then closing in on her breath with every round, with every refill. Maybe it’s the odd sense of -- only wanting to drink to look like she’s actually there and present with the others, and Ignis of all the people understands that about her even when he sometimes, only sometimes, drinks like he’s racing everyone else to the bottoms of their bottles or glasses.

Normally she would have been fine with the company, with the quiet presence of the others, even if they wind up talking around her -- there are nights when that’s exactly what she prefers, just their physical warmth surrounding her, just their words that they use like weapons but never directed at her, never meant to hurt here.

Like the good kind of reminder, like the good and welcome kind of interruption.

And these nights make her ache, and make her need that interruption. Make her need every kind of distraction she can actually settle on, or that will actually let her be diverted. Lying awake with Noctis, clinging to each other’s hands, in the nights since she first told Prompto about -- a witness, a source, hiding within the ranks of the Izunias. In the nights after Prompto actually ran into Cor Leonis in the spike-slow hours before sunrise, where she had been making her way back to bed from one of the shooting ranges and he had been hurrying towards the doors out of the Citadel.

It’s taking time for the summons to the family to penetrate into every last corner and shadow of the Citadel: and maybe she understands. The message can only open the door to so many terrible things. The message can only be trauma and pain, to people already walking around with their own horrific nightmares of battling every single other soul in Insomnia, it seems, sometimes. The summons can’t possibly mean anything good, and every last soldier in this place is bound to it: from Talcott, to Crowe, to every single man and woman advising Aulea and Noctis both, and all the way down the line to -- herself.

She still shivers in the here and now as she remembers Cor, and his icy blue eyes: how blank they had been, strangely only slivered with concern when he’d rescued her from Caligo.

But in her last encounter with him -- he looked like he had aged ten entire years, or perhaps more, in only a fraction of the time. He had looked like he had been confronting all kinds of demons, all kinds of nightmares -- bare-handed, bare-headed, bloodied and most of the way to broken.

Aulea had given her a mental image of Cor the implacable, Cor who would probably draw a damn sword and stand against all the evils in Insomnia, if it came to that, regardless of whether there was anyone else left to protect -- regardless of whether there was anyone to help him or shelter him or even back him up. Cor who wore his tarnished badge and jacket and cap like the only ragged bits of armor he would deign to carry, in his battle against the endless nights, the endless hatred dragging at his footsteps, the endless contempt that everyone else in the world might have for the last cop in a city where the streets stank of blood and spent ammo and bile and vomit and all the other fun things that spilled out of the bodies of the dead and the dying.

Cor, in that one encounter, on that recent night, had not looked anything like the man Aulea had described.

In the here and now she remembers the irrational and entirely unknown impulse she’d had, to offer him some kind of comfort -- some kind of kindness that maybe he didn’t even deserve, considering she had spent all her time in the Leide neighborhoods out-of-her-mind scared, and not just because of what Caligo had done to her.

She almost feels both far too right and far too wrong for the terrible conflict in that one impulse, and she wants and needs to drink it back to the depths of her mind and its haunted cracks and corners, and she tries to hurry along, back to the decanter and its copper-golden liquid, and her hand trembles as she pours, and she wastes a few drops of the liquor, splashing it past the rim of her tumbler.

She throws a small block of ice in, after, swirls the whole thing around just to get the liquor barely cooler than her own skin-temperature, and then she tries to gulp down as much of it as she can on the first swallow.

So many reasons to drink, so many things to forget and she can’t, and Cor’s haunted face was only the first item on the list: it’s not even the worst one.

No, what’s worse than that are Noctis’s words, the shaken whispers of her in the night, words that won’t let either one of them sleep.

Prompto’s not even supposed to be hearing any of this: but Noctis will tell her every night and she will tell Noctis to keep talking, for the sake of pouring out the poison and the fear and all the terrible thoughts, all the terrible words that the witness, the source, must be pouring out somehow. 

And the nights, the words, the poison, passing from Noctis to -- to her. She’d thrown herself into that faltering stream -- she’d demanded the stream turn into a river -- and the little lines of relief in Noctis’s face were worth the pain of catching the words willingly.

Someone has to do it for Noctis -- and she’s willing, she’s willing, she’s always been willing, she thinks, and what does that make her? What will the poison do to _her_?

Prompto’s not even supposed to know about these things, she’s not supposed to have the inside track because anyway this is all supposed to be knowledge shared with the entire fucking rest of the ranks -- every single last Lucis Caelum soldier, that’s the point of the summons -- and yet she knew half the story, she understood what the story was all about, the moment Noctis started sharing -- the moment she started urging Noctis to share.

The red drug and its effects, she knows, in the form of her own turned-about-senseless mind, in the form of her own choking and tangled and brambled fears; in the forms of Loqi and of the things she and Ignis had fought; in the forms of the rest of the Izunia ranks and their manic gleeful smiles at something that was hurt, something that was dying, something that was broken and oozing out bile and worse.

Bad as the red drug was, is, the other thing is worse.

Worse like she can’t even begin to imagine. Worse, bigger, so much more terrifying.

And now she’s going to have to start drinking straight from the decanter, now that she’s thinking of it again. Now that she knows the entire purpose of the drug that Caligo had forced into her.

Now that she knows who the actual target of that drug is, and what it does to that target.

The drug that had made her lose her mind: what is the point of it anyway? Why was it even made?

And the witness, the source, had been so matter-of-fact and so fucking scared, when they answered that question.

That’s Noctis’s story and Prompto’s willing to accept it.

Caligo had made the drug for Ardyn Izunia.

Made it for him to get him through his days and nights.

Made it for him to serve as a fucking _painkiller_.

She’s going to be sick -- she pushes away from the bar, huddles against the wall of shelves and niches. Curls up into a ball of rage and helplessness and something that’s far too large and far too spiky and far too painful to be just disgust -- something so much more bottomless than just horror -- she shoves her hands into her hair, and clutches at her scalp -- there’s a scream rising in her chest, in her throat, it’s trying to rip its way out -- 

The thought of wanting and needing and demanding Caligo’s drug -- she hisses, pain searing down her every worn-out nerve yet again -- 

Her thumb brushes against the small warm weight of her ornament, her jewel, and somehow she finds the skill to pull it carefully out from where she’s been wearing it, caught in a narrow twist of hair -- she clutches the wood and the pearl in her hand and shakes, shakes, opens her mouth and the next thing she knows her ears are ringing with the echoes of her own scream -- 

Knock, knock, from somewhere far away.

Ornament in one hand, clutched to her heart; she reaches for her pistol with the other, and nothing about her grip on either of those things is steady. 

Nothing about her grip on her own sanity is steady -- she and Noctis both, she thinks, and she half-moans her name, Noctis’s name, half a prayer -- 

“Prompto. I’m sorry, it’s me, it’s not -- Noctis.”

Footsteps advancing on her.

She can’t even lift her head to look.

“It’s me. Lunafreya.”

She exhales, shaking with the effort to do so. “Sorry.”

“What for?”

“Don’t know,” she grates out, and she forces herself to look in the direction of that kind voice.

Lunafreya is just settling against the bar, sitting on the floor with her, here and not really here because she’s still about an arm’s-length away, and Prompto is grateful, stupidly, guiltily, for her presence.

Kind, and also unsteady, as Lunafreya says, “I don’t know what you know. What you’ve been told.”

“Not telling you,” she says, quickly.

But unfolding from her fetal crouch is slow and difficult at best, and while she’s no longer reaching for her gun, she can’t make herself let go of the hair stick. She can’t pull it away from her heart.

Noctis is -- not here, is walking through her own nightmares, is working through the slings and arrows of whatever else it is she’s still learning from that source, and tomorrow, very soon, all the poison she’s been carrying around in her will be spread out to everyone else.

All the poison that Prompto’s already taken in, and maybe having everyone else know, will help her -- she just can’t see how that might work.

“I don’t want to know, and yet I will have to, won’t I?” Long, long, low sigh, almost a moan, coming from Lunafreya. “Mother said that first.”

It takes her a moment to find the right way to ask, but she settles on: “Then how are you holding up? You. Her.”

“I thought you were there, when I said it,” and she looks over, and Lunafreya is wincing, a little. “Forgive me. I assumed. You are often to be found in the same places as Ignis.”

“Often.” Prompto offers her a shrug. “But he sometimes likes to be with other people. I -- don’t.”

“Mm. That I do know.”

Silence, until she breaks it: “You might as well tell me.” 

Not to be unkind, and not to be rude, and not to offer her the same way out she willingly lays at Noctis’s feet: but Prompto means it just the same, means the words as she says them.

She almost regrets asking, when she hears the answer -- and the words come out slowly at first, halting at first, before they start picking up speed and then it’s just like Lunafreya’s found a gun and started shooting -- maybe not at Prompto herself directly, but the building fear in the words certainly feels like an attack, too.

“I couldn’t sleep. I haven’t been sleeping. So what else is new? But now, these nights, since we were told -- I can’t stop thinking about later, about today, when is the meeting? Later. Whenever. 

“Whatever it is that will happen, when you’re all assembled, and then someone will open a side door and let my mother in, let me in, and we would so obviously be your guests. I’ve been wearing myself out, worrying. And why am I worried? I worry because -- why must we be there when the Donnas speak, too? What good would that do you, or us? We’re not Lucis Caelums -- and yet both Noctis and Aulea have told us that we must be there. What do they want from us? What could we possibly do to help? We will not even get a vote, if it should come to that. The Lucis Caelums must choose their own future -- we don’t even know what tomorrow might look like. We don’t even know if we’ll live to see it.” 

Lunafreya is speaking into her own hands at the end of it, where she’s covering her face, the words gone quick and unfocused and Prompto can see her shaking. 

She can, she can offer some kind of commiseration at least: so she tries to close some of the distance between them. Tries to sit a little closer, hoping Lunafreya can feel her presence.

“I wish I knew more,” she mutters, after a moment. “I wish I could say something to make you feel better.”

Movement, the hard shake of Lunafreya’s head that can only mean denial.

She thinks she’d have taken offense, if this had been any other night: but she reaches out to Lunafreya’s shoulder instead, and says, “I know. That’s how I feel, pretty much all the time.”

“You help Noctis. I see you. And I see the effect you have on Noctis. Maybe she doesn’t smile very much but -- maybe, maybe some nights, she sneers a little less. Scowls a little less.” Lunafreya is looking up and pointing at her own pale eyebrows. “The lines in her forehead. I cannot imagine how much stress she must be under, and yet -- I see that you have been easing that stress.”

“Yeah,” and it’s even easy to admit it. “I’m trying.”

“She will have to make it up to you at some point, will she not?”

“You’re all on the same wavelength, aren’t you,” she says, after a moment, after she tries to understand what Lunafreya’s just said. “You and Ignis and Cindy. Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised. The number of times the others have told Noctis -- while I’m sitting right there with her, you know? -- to take care of me. I wish I understood how that works. I’m still a stranger to half the people here. So you, they -- why do you even want to take care of me? Why do you make a point out of telling Noctis to take care of me?”

“I will not answer those questions for anyone else. Only for myself.” Lunafreya’s hand is a little cold, when she places it over hers. “I will only say that -- for everything I know about you, which is truly not much -- and you said it yourself, that you are still halfway a stranger -- that does not change the fact you deserve to be treated like you are a human being. Which is what you are. Even if you yourself say that sometimes you feel otherwise.”

“I do,” Prompto says, softly. “Maybe not that often these days.”

“Then it is working. Then we will keep going as we have.”

She watches Lunafreya get up, and reach for a fresh glass, and help herself to the contents of the decanter -- even if she does wince after the first swallow. “Mm. Not what I expected.”

“Want more?” Prompto asks as she retrieves her tumbler.

“Yes, please.”

She pours out that round, and then Lunafreya takes care of the next, and she’s back to feeling lightheaded and a little too warm around the collar -- 

“Lunafreya?”

She doesn’t quite startle when she hears that voice -- maybe it’s the drink, maybe it’s the fact that Lunafreya only startles a little, and raises her voice to respond:

“Maman? We are here.”

“I have been looking all over for you -- ” Footsteps, this time actually in this room with her and with Lunafreya -- footsteps rapidly approaching, and then she’s looking up into the mildly worried face of Lunafreya’s mother.

And Lunafreya takes the hand that falls onto her shoulder, the hand that belongs to her mother, and she clings to it as much as she clings to her glass.

“Hello, Prompto,” she hears Sylva Nox Fleuret say, as she sits down with them.

“Hello,” she says -- she feels like a fool, not knowing if there’s a title she can address the other woman by -- and even with the worn-down look in her eyes, even with the droop in her collars, even with the multiplication of colorless strands at her temples, she still puts Prompto in mind of some kind of leader. Maybe she’d be a different kind of leader, compared to Aulea, compared to Noctis. But what would the actual differences between the three of them be?

So many things she doesn’t know, she still can’t know.

“I don’t know what I’m supposed to call you. I just know I have to show you respect,” she says.

“I am grateful for that respect that you show, to me and to Lunafreya.” 

To her daughter, she adds, while motioning to the decanter, “Is it any good?”

“Yes,” Prompto mumbles.

“No.” Lunafreya, muttering, like she’s about to throw the decanter against one of the other walls.

“I wish I could offer you something else, dear heart.”

“Then we would not be having this conversation here, maman.”

“That is true.” Long, long sigh -- and Sylva takes her daughter’s glass, drinks the dregs in it, winces. “Too rough.”

She rises, halfway up onto one knee. “I can look for -- something else.”

She watches Sylva shake her head. “No need for that, Prompto. Please, I am fine.”

“No you’re not.” 

Prompto has to blink, too, at the sullen twist of Lunafreya’s mouth -- but it isn’t for her, it isn’t for her mother, it isn’t for this place, if the next words are anything to go by: “I told her.”

Eyebrow, rising, towards Sylva’s hairline. “Why?”

“I asked,” and Prompto tries to smile when Sylva turns back to her. Tries to stay afloat in the conversation. “She said, you don’t know what’s going on, basically.”

“If you are talking about -- tomorrow or later or whenever we shall be summoned, then -- yes.”

What she couldn’t say to Lunafreya earlier, she thinks she might be able to say to Sylva now, so she takes a deep breath. “Can I ask you something?”

And that’s a smile that she gets, but it also makes Sylva look like she might crumble around the edges. “You may keep asking, and I will answer if I can.”

She tries to be -- careful, because of that brittle smile. “You’re not Lucis Caelums, I know that much, but -- but you’re tied to them, right? You’ve always been. Closer than Amicitias. Closer than Aurums. Iris told me, Cindy told me. What does that mean? And if you’re tied to the Lucis Caelums then why don’t you actually know what’s going on? Why aren’t you part of those meetings that they’re having?”

“The first questions you ask are the most complicated ones,” she hears Sylva say.

She almost starts to take her words back.

But Sylva’s mouth twists the way Lunafreya’s had -- she looks resigned, and she looks thoughtful -- and then she starts speaking again: “But these things that are complicated now -- were not so, in the beginning. Forgive me for -- starting so far afield from your question. I will try to get to the answers as quickly as I can, but they will not make much sense without the history.”

“History,” she hears Lunafreya say, almost like she might be cursing. “Look where that got them. Look where that got us.”

She watches Sylva pull her daughter into a brief embrace. 

“You know who we used to be?”

“Insomnia’s leaders, when there were no gangs,” Prompto says.

Slow shake of Sylva’s head. “There were always gangs in Insomnia; they only did not look as they do now. Criminals in fine outfits, that’s all, and there were so many of them, trying to lead everyone else astray, right from the beginning. Perhaps they were part of the foundations of all the cities that had been built here, before Insomnia itself -- the bedrock of Insomnia, the roots of it. 

“And some of those criminals came to power, themselves, and some of them became even stronger. The more Insomnia struggled to fight them off -- the more my family tried to fight them off -- the stronger they became, the more powerful and the more entrenched they became, and in the end my family turned down a dark road. Down to the long slow path of its fall.

“I will not say that it was with the Nox Fleurets, as with Insomnia. We were not the cause of this city’s ruin; and this city did not cause ours. It was not that kind of relationship; the trails turned towards the same kind of darkness. The same kind of ruin. 

“Sometimes,” and Sylva exhales, heavily, almost like a sob. “Sometimes, I wonder if Insomnia was always meant to fall. So many other cities in this exact same place had crumbled into dust, after all. All things we make must be unmade. We are all only humans, and we carry on in the way of the world, and we carry on with the weight of it.”

She thinks she doesn’t quite catch what Lunafreya adds; she only thinks it sounds like an actual obscenity.

And besides, she has objections to that last statement, because -- some people she knows can’t really be human, not like Noctis and Ignis and Aulea are human, anyway, and that doesn’t even really make sense, so she keeps her mouth shut.

Sylva doesn’t react to Lunafreya or to her, is all she can see, when she focuses on them again.

“But -- to answer your question, Prompto. An actual answer. Which is that all that history has gone before, and it has consumed my family, every single one of us that’s ever been born, and Lunafreya and I are the only survivors now, as far as I know.

“And all throughout that history we have found ways to support the Lucis Caelums. Oh, they’re not paragons. Far from it. We are not paragons either. But our goals have often matched up with theirs. Tied together, like knots in a thread. If that is the only reason for them to extend this kindness to us, then I will take it: as we have, at times, shown them kindness, too. I wish I could tell you about Regis now. How he grew up into the man he became, and how I was always pushed into the role of his teacher.

“For all that and more: for the sake of all our old ties to them, all the ways we have become linked with them, the Lucis Caelums have been good enough to take us in as guests, now. Or perhaps the better word is _refugee_ ; we appear as we do, and that is really all we have left, these appearances that we’re trying to keep up for the sake of our own pride. And we are only here on the kindness of Aulea, of Noctis, of Ceres perhaps, but I cannot trust all the others who surround them, for the simple reason that I don’t know them as well as I do the ones I named.”

“Don’t forget Clarus, maman. I nearly did,” she hears Lunafreya say.

“I wish we could see him. Perhaps there is still something I could do to help him.”

Maybe it’s a little more difficult to think, but Prompto tries, and she finally comes up with: “You and them. You’re -- all in this together.”

She hears Sylva sigh, again. “For what that’s worth, now. And for what good it can do Lunafreya and I, now. That’s why I envy you.”

She thinks she’d fall over if she weren’t already sitting on this floor. “What?”

“Your life is simpler,” she hears Sylva say, flatly, calmly. “The people in this Citadel, and you, Prompto, you in their ranks -- you’ve made some kind of promises to them, some kind of vow or oath to serve. So that’s all the obligation you need honor in this world. Everything else you want to do, as long as it doesn’t clash with those promises, you’re free to do. We -- can’t really do that, and even if I wanted to, Aulea wouldn’t allow me. She has some kind of strange and noble idea about -- keeping my family alive. But how can we do that? I live, Lunafreya lives, and after that -- who else will remain?

“When we fell on hard times, the Lucis Caelums extended the help that they could give -- and we tried to reciprocate, as best as we can, whenever we could still access our family’s resources. Now that’s run out too, and all we can do is ask them to keep us safe. So we’re here, in their own stronghold, the last they’ve got. Before you think I’m not grateful, I am, because at least we’re still alive.”

“I never thought you wouldn’t be grateful,” she says, quietly. 

“All we can do is -- volunteer to go out with you,” she hears Lunafreya say. 

When did she start sounding angry? 

“And maman heals who she can.”

“Which is still -- not very much, considering what they -- you, Prompto, that includes you, too -- what you fight when you can still go out there,” Sylva says. “But in the end all of that means nothing because that makes Lunafreya and I guests, who help where they can, and we still have not sworn any oaths to them, and that is why we don’t know anything of what’s happening now, when they meet behind their closed doors.

“That is why sometimes I wake up and wonder, if the ones around Aulea and Noctis are merely asking us to come to the family meeting to taunt us. To rub salt in our wounds. It’s an unworthy thought. I know this. But these are unworthy nights.”

There’s a pause, then, and all Prompto can hear are their breaths and her own, and it’s a pause that needles at her, until she can’t take it any more and she has to look back at them.

At Sylva as she covers her face with one hand; at Lunafreya listing against her mother’s shoulder.

“I am so tired.” Dark shadows in Sylva’s voice, when she speaks again. “I am so, so godsdamned tired.”

“I have another question,” she says, very quietly. “You don’t have to answer this one.”

“Ask,” she hears Sylva say. “I’ll decide if I should answer it.”

“So will I.” Lunafreya’s voice is only a little steadier than her mother’s.

She looks at the way their expressions waver, and twist, and she takes the shot. “You don’t mind the helping. You might not even mind the part where you’re here and there’s nowhere else to go. But -- you mind the part where you owe them something.”

Again that silence falls, but this time, she tries to wait them out.

She’s expecting them to be sharp with her; she’s not expecting Sylva to cover her face with her hands as Lunafreya had. 

When she reaches out for the decanter, Prompto passes it to her. 

Sylva drinks directly from the mouth of the container, and winces afterwards, and says, “That wasn’t a question. And -- you’re wrong, but -- that’s all right, because we were, are still, wrong, too.

“If only it could work out so neatly,” Sylva continues, when she’s managed to blow out a heavy breath. “That I could owe them my life and Lunafreya’s, and that they could owe me for Ravus. Then we’d be even. Not equals, not now, not even if it was the two of us against the two of them. But even, and we’d have leverage we could use against each other, Aulea and I. Good enough to commence negotiations with.”

Lunafreya sighs, too, and says, “Oh, fuck -- maman, no. Please don’t.”

“It needs to be said, Lunafreya,” she hears Sylva say. “We must say it and get over it, or else we’ll only wind up hurting ourselves and them, too, and then gods alone know where Noctis will end up, trying to atone for a sin she never committed in the first place.”

And shock charges through her, makes her cover her mouth; she remembers the terse summary that Noctis had given her -- remembers the most recent connection between Noctis and the Nox Fleurets. “Oh.”

“If you’re saying that, if you’re not asking questions, then you know, but -- as I said, it needs getting over,” and she has to nod, at the lines of pain that are still multiplying in Sylva’s face. “Neither of them did anything wrong, truly: neither Noctis nor Ravus. If they agreed to some kind of arrangement, then that is what they had -- and if that arrangement ended, then it did. 

“I was surprised, myself, that they broke off with very little acrimony. I know that Noctis was at least clear in that she wanted the arrangement to end; I know that at least she tried to make her own terms easy to understand. As for what happened after that end -- I tried to help my son as best as I could, but he chose his next actions, and no amount of assigning blame can change that. Because there is no blame to be assigned; there never was.”

She looks away, knowing what she’s about to say is technically a breach of Noctis’s trust, but -- it can’t be a betrayal, can it? “She talks about him in her sleep, still. I hear her when I wake up from my nightmares.”

“Which proves my point, unfortunately,” she hears Sylva say, and now she really does sound like she’s on the verge of tears.

Prompto swallows her own sob. Doesn’t look up at them when she offers them a clean rag from her pocket.

“Why do I feel like this is just the beginning?” Lunafreya, weeping as she speaks. “Why do I feel like we’re walking away from the light?”

“Yeah,” Prompto says, and covers her face, and tastes her own saltwater on her lips.


	16. Chapter 16

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Anniversary update! Anniversary chapter! Check out the art [HERE](https://twitter.com/MathClassWar/status/1097176726205980672)!

Pause in the steady flow of the words, long enough that Prompto takes a deep breath and actually hears the rush and the rattle of the air moving into her expanding lungs, her contracting diaphragm, the muscles in the core of her -- moving into, and then out of. Hears the soft puff of the accompanying exhale, as she releases the companion and the consequence of that indrawn breath, into the softly rising smoke and steam that’s starting to overflow this space of shadows, this space of wide eyes. Faces gone slack with shock, wavering and guttering in the flicker of the candles in their elaborate towering fixtures. End to end of this long room, still unfamiliar to her, and pretty much every inch of space and every staring face outside of the single cleared circle caught and pinned on the woman in the veil.

Her rough low voice, somehow so steady, even as she continues to speak -- even as the words pouring from her paint a picture that is nothing short of terrifying.

Pause that’s long enough for Prompto to understand the different kind of silence of her own blood pounding through her veins, her own white noise, her own kind of unquiet -- and yet she prefers it now, to anything else, to anyone else, because if Noctis breathes again, if Noctis starts talking again -- 

She does, and Prompto growls, and she’s possibly past the point of caring who hears.

“I had this information straight from Ardyn Izunia’s doctor himself. Most days the gods hate us; most days they still do, except for when I managed to get my hands on Caligo Ulldor, and I can’t even think of that as a blessing any more. How could I? I can’t trust the words that came out of his mouth, because why in all the fucking hells would he tell me anything true? Izunias lie. That’s the rule. The entire fucking world knows that for the truth.”

Mutters from the men and the women standing in ragged ranks around her; mutters and shifting and agreement, and no one makes a move out the door.

Prompto almost wishes they did have the option to run.

“And because Izunias lie, I wouldn’t have blamed any one of you if you’d found Caligo and you’d shot first and asked questions never. Why would a person like that even deserve to live, anyhow? Didn’t he create the Red Scourge? Or, well, that’s what he said.” Brittle laughter. It lasts for only a moment.

Next to Prompto, Ignis draws in a sharp short breath -- the way they’re pressed together, shoulder to shoulder, makes it sound like he’s picked up a gun and cocked it, and she honestly can’t blame him. Not for the sound, and not for the shock that blanks out all of the life in his expression, when she cuts her eyes toward him: he looks like he’s put that imaginary gun right to his own temple, and not entirely because he wants to.

And how can she reassure him, when the next thing that Noctis says is:

“I found him. I had help. Someone led me to him and then I got the chance to -- talk to him, just a little.”

Prompto swallows, hard, against the memory of a different kind of veil. Against the most recent instance of red drying on Noctis’s knuckles, and the wet gulping breaths of someone being pushed to the brink of death. Whites of their eyes showing all around, and the wreck of a man who knew he was being shattered, slowly, inexorably.

“I forced him to talk about everything he’s done, and -- I wish I could have unheard it. I wish I hadn’t needed to know what it was that he was privy to -- I’ve got enough nightmares of my own and I really don’t need to add any more: but I do, I did it, and now we know more about the Izunias. We’re closer now than we ever have been before, and by we I mean,” and Prompto watches her gesture behind herself, in the direction of Aulea and all the people standing around her. “And it’s worse. A lot worse. It isn’t just Red Scourge: he created something else, he created something even worse, and what for?” 

Now she has to talk over the outbreak of whispers, the outbreak of questioning faces, and Prompto can’t blame the ranks. 

Iris and Cindy are whispering on her other side and she can just about make out the rising curses, the rising anger, and she wants to lean in and join them but -- 

Ignis beats everyone else to the punch, and catches her hand, and squeezes.

Whispers, “Courage, Prompto.”

And she wishes she could return the sentiment, she really does, because he deserves it and more: but she only has enough time to suck in a deep and disturbed breath, the sound of which only partly obscures Noctis.

“If you’ve smoked weed, if you’ve shot up smack, you know how Red Scourge works. It obliterates you, gives you a high, and then you come down and you come back to the land of the living. Even if it leaves you wanting more, needing more, and you start destroying yourself looking for a bigger and better high.”

Prompto grinds her teeth and forces herself to keep staring over Noctis’s head, forces herself to breathe past the reminder of what she’d been turned into.

“Many of you know that. I don’t really have to explain that part to you, but I had to, so you understand: because Caligo made something else that works in the exact opposite direction.

“That something else, that other drug, I don’t know what it’s called and I’m not giving it a name, because I fucking refuse to. I wish it didn’t exist. What it does is, it destroys you. That’s about all it can do, from the first dose, and you don’t need a whole lot for all the effects to hit you. There’s no high, there’s no euphoria: it’s straight to the crash, a total wipeout. Plays tricks with your senses and your mind.”

She feels Cindy wrap an arm around her shoulders. She feels Iris’s hand in the small of her back.

She’s grateful, so grateful, to all three of them. 

“You’ll ask: then what is the point of that drug, if it doesn’t give you a high? The answer, and the reason why that drug is so fucking dangerous, is this: it makes you want to be destroyed, because your nerves don’t recover for a long time.

“Because taking that drug, you don’t feel pain for a long time.”

The silence that follows those words is almost as absolute as when this had all started: the silence of the ranks that had parted, eyes sharp and watching, as Noctis cut a path through to where Aulea and her own inner circle had been standing at the very head of the room.

Prompto had squirmed, internally, guts in a heaving roil, as she’d trailed immediately after Noctis -- but not quickly enough that she couldn’t catch the whispers that, after all, had not followed in Noctis’s wake.

The whispers had been for her, wrapped in Lucis Caelum colors, black and silver and gold.

Whispers that had only grown louder and more shocked when Noctis had turned to face the rest of the room -- and carefully, deliberately, cast back the veil that she’d been wearing as she’d come in.

And instead of her copy of the great golden yoke laid onto Aulea’s shoulders -- and Prompto’s seen that yoke, too, Noctis’s own yoke, identical to her mother’s in nearly all of the details -- Noctis had been wearing the blue pearls in all their plain, stunning magnificence. The single exquisite strand, and the candle-flames catching on the nearly living sheen of every piece. Black ribbons in river-current patterns trailing from the left-loose ends of the necklace as she had been wearing it. 

Blue pearls around her neck -- the string that had been, and still is, missing one piece -- the piece that Prompto feels for, in the here and now, the piece at the tip of her hair stick, where she’s wearing it prominently over her right ear. 

“Quiet, please,” and that’s the first time she’s heard Aulea speak during this gathering, and it should have been chilling, the way her voice strikes through the babble and the shock and the disbelief -- the way a sword might, Prompto thinks, the way steel being drawn might cut through an entire crowd’s worth of conversations.

In the wake of what Noctis has just said, however, the steel of Aulea’s voice is a relief as sharp and keen as lancing a boil.

She sees Noctis look over her shoulder in response: how she locks eyes with her own mother.

On Aulea’s face, a different kind of hard-edged expression: and Prompto’s seen it directed at Cor, directed at Ceres, directed at Gladiolus, and every single one of them had seemed to flinch away from it.

Noctis grins, lopsided, entirely like a snarl, and turns back to the ranks. 

“I’m telling you this because that second drug is a problem: it’s a painkiller, that’s all it is, and who the fuck would be crazy enough to use it? Who the fuck would be crazy enough to demand a drug like that? Who would need so much of it that it’s starting to get out onto the streets?

“That drug is Ardyn Izunia’s fucking painkiller.”

Iris actually hisses, and hers is only the first reaction that Prompto perceives.

The other one she knows of, too close, too quiet, too angry, is Ignis’s: because in the very breath before he drops her hand, he suddenly feels like every kind of cold and desperate night she’s ever survived, imprisoned and watched and chained to a bed. He suddenly feels like he’s shaking next to her -- and when she tries to hold on to his hand he snatches it away from her, knuckles grinding as he clenches it into a fist -- 

Too softly, too gently, from his other side: “Ignis.”

Prompto leans backward, just a little, and catches Lunafreya’s eye -- but she soon turns away, and draws Ignis into her side, and maybe he lets out a small sort of wounded sound as he covers his face and turns in her direction.

How Prompto wants to collapse, too, now that Noctis is finally getting to one of the points of all of this: “I’m not telling you any of this to scare you. I’m telling you this so you know, so you know exactly what we’re facing now. I’m thinking Ardyn’s taking that drug so he doesn’t have to feel any pain. I’m thinking he’s taking it so he can forget that every day that passes means he’s slipping closer and closer to death.

“Escape from cancer. Escape from death. 

“How soft. How safe. How comforting.”

She, she can clearly remember standing upon the stones of this floor, this room, and wanting so very badly to spit, clawing to hold on to some unworthy thought or another -- and that had been the reason why she hadn’t gone through with it. An unworthy thought, that was all, and there still isn’t any point in turning it into an equally unworthy action.

In the here and now: Noctis actually does spit, and she even makes the movement seem almost admirable, even though Prompto thinks she’s not the only one to wince.

And after, Noctis explodes. There’s no other word for it. 

“He doesn’t deserve that! Soft and safe and comfort -- what the actual fuck. He thinks he deserves it; no, he thinks he’s _owed_ it. Son of a bitch. I’m thinking exactly the opposite. For what he’s done to you, for what he’s done to us -- he deserves to pay! He deserves pain!”

It shouldn’t work: but her words spark another wave of whispers, stifled cheers, and this time it catches, too, at the people surrounding Aulea. Sylva in her white. Gladiolus in his glower, and Crowe with her eyes concealed by a pair of large sunglasses. 

“I’m thinking it would be a crime for him to go softly, easily, insulated and thinking he’s invincible. I’m thinking I won’t rest until he feels every fucking slow and agonizing moment of payback. Every moment we can get out of him as he’s eaten alive by revenge. Lucis Caelum revenge -- ours and yours! And he can die, after, but only after every damn moment of all the pain he can feel -- he can feel that and then maybe he can die. 

“I wanted you to know exactly what we’re up against, because you deserve to know. Because we need your help. How exactly do you stop someone who doesn’t feel pain? How do you make them feel that death really is coming, and not at their say-so but ours? Maybe you’ll have ideas. We’re all ears. You’re a part of this, we’re not doing this alone.”

Someone whoops in the back of the hall.

Noctis laughs, softly, sweetly, and Prompto has heard that laugh before: a laugh that makes her want to run, because there’s no point in defending against it. A laugh like a subtle blade, poisoned, and slid deep into the heart. “I want him to feel so much pain it overcomes that fucking drug. I want him to hurt so bad he forgets his name, he forgets all those pretty little lies he tells himself, while we’re all closing in on him. I hope you’ll join me for that.”

A volley of a question, the words like bullets from somewhere much closer in the crowd, and Prompto nearly reaches for her own gun where it’s tucked in against her side: “How are we going to do that, when we’ve been searching for the bastard for months? Every place we go, he’s already long gone. He knows we’re looking for him and he’s always been able to get away. How are we going to fight someone we can’t even find?”

Again, for a moment, Prompto is alone with her laboring heart, her nervous breaths.

And then, Noctis’s response: “Glad you asked. We’ve finally gotten the break we needed.”

She knows exactly what’s coming: she does, and Aulea knows, and Ceres -- who is nowhere in this chamber -- knows.

No one else does and she feels it, as the others hear those words and every single one of them goes tense: even Lunafreya looks up sharply from where she’s letting Ignis lean heavily into her side. Beside them, Sylva looks like she’s about to draw her sword.

And that’s to say nothing of Iris, of Cindy, of Gladiolus, all three of them hanging on Noctis’s silence, and the words that must surely come out of her mouth, the answer to that question that was more than a demand.

“Leide’s got intelligence on Ardyn Izunia because -- because they planted a mole in their ranks,” and Noctis doesn’t rush through the words, but Prompto feels them thrum through her in a hurry, anyway. “I had this information straight from Cor Leonis’s mouth. You’ll have seen him among us, these past few nights; sorry if you’ve been having nightmares over that ugly mug. 

“He was here, or he’s been coming here, to tell us that there’s a police informer among the Izunias. And whoever it is, is alive, and is still getting information out, and Leide’s sharing that information with us now.”

Somehow, it’s important for Prompto to see -- all the reactions, and the first one she spots is Sylva’s, who’s all but fallen to her knees -- only Aulea’s arm around her waist is keeping her upright now.

Ignis, sweating and pale and clutching white-knuckled at Lunafreya -- and her equally white-knuckled grasp on him. They may be leaning on each other, but they also look like they’re about to collapse together.

Cindy, hand over her mouth; Iris, her mouth working in silent twisting shapes.

Shouted questions of “How?” and “Why?” from the crowd of soldiers, scattered here and there, and all the weariness that she’d seen in them has been stripped away and replaced with a vicious kind of hope, mixed irretrievably with hatred.

She can understand those two things, if she encounters them and separately -- but not when the underlying current seems to be a colossal kind of mourning. The kind that could only come out of loss, and what kind of loss? The kind that can only be silent, that can only be deadweight, that can only oppress.

How many people in just this damn Citadel have lost -- something or someone -- to the Izunias? The thought makes her mind spin, makes her want to scream and weep, the more so when she thinks she might have to make the original question bigger because -- it isn’t just about the Citadel, or the city streets huddled in its protective shadow.

How many people in Insomnia have lost because of something the Izunias did?

And what have they all done, every single one of them -- the ones who’ve lost and the ones who maybe haven’t -- what have they all done to that informer? What are they doing to that person even now?

Before she can stagger, before she can fall -- there’s movement out of the corner of her eye, and a faraway murmuring, and now Prompto’s watching Aulea come forward. Watching her join Noctis in the center of that cleared space. The gold-threaded gauntlet on the hand that she places on her daughter’s shoulders. 

“Allow me,” she thinks Aulea says.

Noctis, starting, wide-eyed suddenly. “Mother -- ”

“This they will need to hear from me. I will brook no arguments.”

“Then I’ll stay for the rest of it.”

“You will do as you will,” and that part Prompto hears clearly, before Aulea steps away from Noctis and bellows, “ _Quiet!_ ”

Under cover of the spreading wave of silence -- questions and fierce anger seemingly lingering in ragged patches because if Prompto can’t hear the actual words, then she can still almost-hear the voices brimming with rage -- she can see the expressions still twisted in disbelief and the hopeless, insatiable hunger that she thinks she can still find in the lines of her own face, every time she makes herself look in the mirror.

No amount of -- fancy flowers embroidered into her suit jacket, or lace tacked thick and wide onto her shirt-collar, or blue pearls in her hair, can erase that hunger -- and after all, what does she want? 

If not Ardyn dead by her own hand, then by those of the girl who’s half-shambling towards her.

“Noctis,” she murmurs, and she catches her with both hands, in the circle of her arms.

“I have to stay,” she hears Noctis whisper, but the words are nearly drowned out by the high whistle of her breath: and Prompto has heard her breathe like that in the very slowest darkest hours of the nights. 

In the deepest hours of the nightmares that she’s confessed to, the ones Prompto doesn’t even dare bring up after they’ve risen.

“Then we’ll stay,” and Prompto doesn’t really feel the bravery that she’s putting into her own words, but she has to try to get it out to Noctis, has to try and support Noctis, and so she turns Noctis around, and places herself squarely at Noctis’s back. 

The blue pearls chime so very softly as they move against each other, where they’re wrapped in three close rounds, almost snug, around Noctis’s neck.

She wraps her arms around Noctis, at shoulder and at hip, to help prop her up.

Aulea is talking about the witness and -- in her mind Prompto recoils, again, from the thought of that wretched suffering soul. From the gift and the curse of their existence. Passed-on words and the weight of them, the significance of them, compared to her own reports. Her own experience of Ardyn, and the greedy miserly gaze of him. The nights she’d lain awake, battling the urge to vomit out her goblet of red, the urge to drink it all down and lose herself in the shame of giving in.

It’s more than enough to make her shiver, too.

“The others,” she hears Noctis say, and then she’s grateful for the very small distraction. 

“If they’re not looking after you now, maybe it’s because they can’t,” she whispers back. “It’s not because they don’t want to.”

She watches Noctis look around, eyes moving slowly, and her face fills with resignation that settles heavy in the lines around her eyes. “And you can, because -- ”

“Now you know why I wanted you to tell me things,” and she tries for a lighter tone -- but she knows she fails, halfway through. “If I knew in advance, if I took the time to -- prepare myself -- then maybe I could help you. Although I might not have done a good job of preparing, or of helping, because right now I’m shaking like you are, and I can barely keep you upright, and that’s not really useful, is it?”

“And I can’t help you either, with me in a state like this,” she hears Noctis say.

“We’ve been like this ever since -- Cor,” is the only way she can say it and not want to empty her stomach onto the stones.

And Prompto tries, she really does, to block out Aulea’s voice, Aulea’s words -- but she ends up putting her forehead down on Noctis’s shoulder, and after a moment she hears Noctis murmur, shaky and gentle, “Maybe you need to -- take a moment.”

Somehow she musters the strength to keep holding on to Noctis -- and somehow she finds the words, too, after spending the days leading up to this room halfway to tongue-tied. “Maybe I do, but Noct. I’m staying if you are. And you knew I was going to say that.”

“Yeah I knew that,” as soft as she already is.

So Prompto keeps on whispering: “I’m with you, now, like, there’s no going back, we already knew this -- maybe we knew this before I ever thought about getting down on my knees for you. But if the others, if your people, if they can’t see what you’re doing by now, then what are they actually doing here? What are they in the ranks for? If they haven’t understood what you’re doing by now, then they maybe never will. Or maybe they don’t want to get it, and honestly, if I were you I wouldn’t waste my time explaining anything -- ”

“Not when we don’t know all the parts, either, we only know a few of the important bits,” but she hears a small laugh, too, though it’s trailing, and quickly cut off.

“Just enough to actually make decisions with,” she mutters, into Noctis’s shoulder.

“Small ones. I wish I could know more, so I could make bigger decisions -- but I’m also grateful I don’t have to.”

“Yeah. One day we’ll know, one day we’ll understand,” she says. “But for now -- ”

“I don’t know about right now. But -- yeah, maybe Mother’s on to something. If she’s got this then she doesn’t need me. There’s nothing else I don’t know; what she heard, I heard too. We don’t hide things from each other. We don’t work that way.”

Prompto almost snorts, then. “And -- you and me, how do we work? Don’t I need to know something? No, don’t answer that. You’ll tell me what I need to know, when I need to know it -- and, and you’ll tell me the truth, always, you said -- ”

“Always, Prompto, always. That was part of my vows to you. I’ll keep reminding you; it’s a good thing for you to hear, isn’t it?”

“Sort of,” she says, and: “How do we get out of here without everyone noticing?”

“You’re joking, right? No one will look at us. My mom’s talking,” she hears Noctis say.

But when Noctis slips out of her arms she can only complain a little, because then she’s too busy ducking, so she can slip beneath everyone else’s notice, and the only glance she catches -- and that mostly on accident, is Ignis’s -- who shakes his head and turns back silently to Lunafreya, and she has to try and remember how sharp he is and how kind he can be, and how there are only a few people in the entirety of the Citadel who might be lucky enough to see him as both of those things.

How lucky Noctis is, then, she thinks, as she gains on the door that’s opened up before her and -- blink. Blink. She can still feel the carpets beneath her boots; otherwise the silent darkness seems the heavier for the distant lights along the corridor, hanging over an empty crossing. 

“Noct?” she whispers.

Hand that slips into her own. “Yeah. This is me. Prom.”

“Have to trust you, and I do,” she says, and that’s how she finds herself on the move, and quickly going through that lit intersection.

Whisper of cold air that cuts past all of her layers, and trembles in Noctis’s hand that she’s clutching, and she says, “Stop.”

“What,” she hears Noctis say.

One word that lets Prompto home in on her, and quickly she sheds her suit jacket and she gropes in the dark for the slope of Noctis’s shoulder. “Wear this.”

“You’ll be cold, too, and we’ll be going somewhere a little warmer.”

“Let’s get there then,” she says. “And that will help you stay warm until we do.”

A step, a breath, coming closer, and Prompto can’t see -- and she thinks neither can Noctis, because the brush of her kiss lands somewhere near Prompto’s eye. 

Just a little bit of warmth to share.

“How do you know where we’re going,” she asks, when they’re on the move again. Her knees, her ankles, are getting warm, because Noctis is steering them up a series of steep steps.

“I’ve done this in my sleep.”

She shakes her head, even when there’s no one to see. “Because that’s not worrying.”

Creak, and a crack of pale outdoors-light that widens into a glimpse of a brooding sky, thick smoke-masses of clouds on the move in a steady whistling breeze, but from time to time it’s actually possible to spot a star or two, the limb of a constellation and the sliverthin crescent of a too-new moon.

Weight on the air that she breathes in, and she stares through the slowly widening door, because -- the night smells like spices, like smoke caught on the petals of far too many flowers, or perhaps the smoke smells like flowers smoldering into colorful ash.

And she can see Noctis, who is holding Prompto’s suit jacket closed at her throat -- Noctis, who’s picking her way through several squares of sectioned-off stones and soil, and the proud tall old-green stems of growing things. 

She tries to follow her past a single shiver of movement -- the wind catching on the edges of a long pale not-quite leaf -- she wants to reach Noctis immediately, wants to keep her warm, but in the very next breath the pale thing unfurls into an uneven circle of petal and ruffles, and it’s all she can do not to cry out. 

“Noct,” she says, instead, hoarse with the cold, hoarse with shock.

“You’ve never been up here,” and does Noct sound sort of kind, or sort of like she’s laughing? “The moonflowers do that.”

“All of them?” And as soon as she says the words out loud, she knows how silly those words are, but -- she can’t help herself. “They all do that?”

“The ones here do,” is the response she gets. 

“I -- I don’t know much about plants,” she says, and feels the thin faint warmth of embarrassment rising in her face. 

“That’s all right. I only know about those because I live here. Everything else that’s shaped like a plant is a mystery to me; you might be able to ask Iris or Gladio or -- hell, ask their dad. This is his place, after all. He started this whole thing.”

Flowers, Iris’s father, and the sky broken into vast fans of clouds on the move -- the pieces fall together for Prompto, then. “This is -- the night-garden. You brought me to your night-garden?”

“Like I said, it’s Clarus’s garden, Mother’s just looking after some of the plants for him. But yes.”

“Why are we here?”

“Because I can’t stand looking at faces right now. Not faces that belong to human beings. The only exception is you.”

She makes her way across the garden, drawn to Noctis’s side -- and maybe she can content herself with looking at flowers, real flowers in all their odd faces and shapes, from the relative safety of the stone bench that Noctis is heading for. 

Stone bench, in the shadow of a wall -- or on first glance she only sees the bricks and the mortar, the jagged crystalline bits of rock embedded into the lines and the joins, but as she gets closer those same lines and joins become blurred out and then she understands why there are leaf-shaped shadows dancing over Noctis’s face.

The thin green lines climbing the face of the wall are vines, tendrils -- and leaves flutter in the remnants of the wind, in the soft breaths that rise from Noctis where she’s pulling off the suit jacket. “Maybe you’d better put this back on, until you feel better.”

Her fingers catch on the buttons and she can’t remember whether she’s supposed to do every single one of them up -- and it’s made trickier because the buttons are small and covered in matte-black fabric -- so she just does most of them, except for the bottom one -- and that lets her breathe a sigh of relief for the added warmth as she sits down next to Noctis at last, and gathers her in close.

She thinks Noctis makes a sound to match when her head droops onto Prompto’s shoulder -- but when she reaches out to card her hand through woodsmoke-scented dark hair, she encounters rustly, fine-grained fabric instead.

Blink. 

Oh, and she smiles, and shakes her head a little at herself.

How could she have forgotten that Noctis is still wearing her veil? Pins run into her hair just behind her ears, to anchor the streaming lengths of lacy material. In the dim light it’s hard to see the careful flick of golden eyeliner just at the outer corners of her eyes, but Prompto knows it’s there, because she’d nearly bitten through her own lip trying to make sure those beautiful eyes matched.

“You can take it off, I won’t mind,” and she counts it as a minor victory that Noctis sounds just a little relaxed. 

“I will, at some point, but you have to know you look like every good dream I’ve ever had, and I never had one of those until I met you.”

Noctis is blinking at her and smiling and hauling her close. “I never pay attention to you, and I should be whipped for that, because -- you have a way with words, you know?”

“I think it’s all the books I read when I was -- where I was,” she said. “Escapist trash.”

“Not trash if it means you can tell me things like that.”

She almost laughs. “You know you don’t have to sweet-talk me to get me to follow you.”

“I don’t know, looking like that I think you deserve all the sweet talking in the world.”

The last glimpse she’d permitted herself in the full-length mirror in Iris’s suite, before Crowe had stuck her head into the room and asked them to follow her up to the stone room at the top of the Citadel: and Prompto had literally crossed her eyes and stuck her own tongue out at her reflection, only for Cindy to poke her sharply in the shoulder and say, “I will not allow you to make fun of yourself like that. Just don’t try it around me, or Iris, or for that matter -- Noctis.”

“I know I picked this out for myself,” she’d said, “but I also know I look like an utter fraud.”

“Hey,” and that had been Iris, and she’d glared right at Prompto’s reflection, and Prompto had done the only smart thing to do in the face of that glare, and shut up, and straightened her lapels and her cuffs.

She’s not looking in a mirror now, and there’s not much light to see by, and Noctis herself is in the way of some of the details, but Prompto’s not about to let her go any time soon.

Still, that means she can only see bits and pieces of what she’s actually wearing: the material of her suit, black with very thin stripes of dark violet. Those wide-spaced pinstripes blotted out by gold-stitched outlines of flowers and only Iris knew what else -- the overall effect of that part of the outfit leaves her looking like she’s wearing an extra layer of lace, tacked neatly all over the jacket and leaving only the cuffs bare.

Weights in the hems, and she can feel one where she’s accidentally sat down on it -- but it’s not uncomfortable, and she likes the thought of those little washer-things, because they’ll let her jacket flow smoothly away from her body if she ever has to draw the gun she’s carrying behind her hip, snug in its holster and the heavy-duty belt she’s wearing with her trousers.

Details, details, in a place like this, she thinks, before pressing a kiss into the veiled top of Noctis’s head. She doesn’t know why Lunafreya had presented her with her dress shirt, the silky dark-blue of it -- where had it come from? Why had Lunafreya said that she was giving it for luck?

She’s about to ask Noctis about it when -- Noctis gets to her feet, and pulls her veil away, and the pins clatter to the stone beneath their feet.

“Can I look at you?”

Prompto feels all her breath fly out of her lungs. “If you’ll let me look at you too.”

Noctis seems to smile, and spread her hands, and Prompto scrubs at her eyes and looks.

Peeking through the gaps of the pearl necklace: the band-like collar that rises high to wrap close around Noctis’s throat. The material is neatly stitched to cross near her right clavicle, and that seam continues down, diagonally, to end somewhere adjacent to her upper arm. Three fabric-covered buttons in that diagonal seam, holding the rest of her upper garment closed -- because it’s all of a piece from the collar on down. Slender sleeves ending in extended triangular points, anchored to Noctis’s middle fingers by brushed-metal rings. 

From her waist to somewhere below her knees, that top is divided into front and back panels. They seem to be cut so she can move around freely and rapidly, in her skin-tight leather trousers cut off precisely at the ankles to show off a finger’s-width of skin, and then the shiny leather of her black pumps. 

She reaches out to touch the faint gold stitched into the front panel of Noctis’s top: the lines are much, much thinner than in her own flowers, but they’re slightly raised from the fabric, as if to make up for how much more discreet they are -- and the more she touches them, the more she’s convinced that they’re tracing out the shapes of skulls. 

“Been meaning to ask,” and she tugs on a fold of that same panel, and Noctis takes a step closer towards her and she nearly loses all her other words as a result. She has to swallow, look away, catch her breath, before she can continue. “I know you guys did this on purpose, you and Iris,” she says, thickly. “I mean. Look at you, look at this, you wear your own colors and that’s just the way the world works, that’s just the colors that really look good on you -- but did you really intend for me to wear the exact same shades? You want people to look at you and at me and think we’re a matched set -- ”

Soft dark chuckle, in response. “I actually don’t hear you complaining.”

“I’m not, I wouldn’t, but -- ”

Noctis’s hand under her chin, making her look up.

Not for the first time, Prompto feels like she might drown in those eyes. 

“It’s simple, really. These are just so other people know,” and with her other hand Noctis gestures, the movement starting with the necklace and ending with Prompto’s hair stick. “The rest is for you and me to figure out. No one else gets to see unless we both want them to. But it doesn’t hurt, for us to match. Unless, unless you’re starting to have second thoughts.”

“They were muttering about you, and about me,” she says, softly, reaching out to Noctis’s cheek. “When you went in and I was walking right on your heels, maybe they thought I was planning to step all over this thing you’re wearing. I didn’t understand what they were saying the things they were saying. Not insults but, but I don’t get it, Noctis, why were they all muttering about silver and gold and knights? Not, not the time of day but -- but I’m guessing they’re not talking about armor either. And you have knights, or they would be your knights, they’ve always been. The people who walk with you. Cindy and Ignis, and especially Iris. She’s the person who watches your back, she’s always been, so shouldn’t she be your knight, or something?”

The lines in Noctis’s face have grown softer and gentler with every word, until she’s smiling, and now Prompto is watching her sink to her knees so that they can look each other more easily in the eyes, and -- she has the vague impulse to pull Noctis back into her lap.

But Noctis resists her, and keeps on smiling -- one hand comes up to thread through the hair at the nape of Prompto’s neck and she sighs, leans in so they’re touching foreheads, and she’s right there when Noctis murmurs, “It’s an old story, like, Mother says it’s as old as Lunafreya’s family. Not a fairy tale or anything like that. Don’t ask me when it started or when it almost ended, don’t ask me why they even came up with it. 

“But what I remember of the story is, the whole difference used to be simple. Simple like: when we talk about Iris, or Gladio, when we talk about the promises they made, all they said was that they would protect their principals’ lives. Get me and Mother out of the line of fire. Give their lives to get us out of danger. With me so far?”

“Yes,” she whispers back.

“So that made them like shields. But in Lunafreya’s family, and in mine, some of those people who did that -- went a little further: they were people who served, people who were protectors, but they were also the people who loved their principals. Like, love as in romantic love, people who would have gotten married if the thought had crossed their minds, that kind of love. Maybe there were people like knights in the other families. I’ve never thought to ask. 

“I think, I heard, that Sylva’s husband was one of those: he became her lover, and then he swore that he would protect her, so he wound up becoming her knight. My grandmother, too; we buried the two of them in the same grave, her and her right-hand woman. I don’t know a whole lot about dad’s side of the family, but he was familiar with the idea, although I don’t know if Mother was his knight. 

“But, my point, I hope you got it? Those people who loved the ones they served, they’re the ones we call knights, here in Insomnia.”

“Your point. I think. Um,” Prompto says, and she feels the smile coming on, and she doesn’t fight it, but only just. “That means your people know about me. And they know I love you.”

Noctis’s smile is dazzling, Prompto thinks: “As much as they know I love you -- and if any one of them makes the mistake of thinking that I’m just using you, or that you’re using me -- believe me, I’ll gut them, and I’ll laugh all the while.”

She should have pulled away at those blood-curdling words, but she just kisses Noctis, instead. “I’d be right there with you. I’d be watching your back.”

“I know.”

“Gold and silver, though? I’m -- gold, obviously. I guess. Or are they confused because of my name?”

She almost regrets asking the question, when Noctis shakes her head and looks briefly away. “If they’re talking about gold, then -- that’s you, that’s what you’re wearing, I really did want you to wear gold because I do. That’s the point. You’re the golden knight. Silver is for -- well. You know who he is. He was -- he said he would have given up his family name for mine, if we had come to that -- he said he would have gotten down on his knees for me. He would have been my silver knight.”

“Yeah, okay, I know who that is,” and Prompto nods, and yanks Noctis straight into her arms. “That guy. Lunafreya’s brother. Why silver though?”

“Ravus. He had silver-ish hair. Closer to white. I can’t remember.” She feels the shudder spike through Noctis, then. “I still wake up wanting to find his body. At least I could have given him a decent burial. At least I could have known what had happened to him.”

“I know.” She kisses Noctis between the eyes. “And I’d help you if you’d let me.”

“Can we get off the topic?”

She’s only too happy to say, “Absolutely.”

And she’s only too happy to fall into the kiss, when it comes: Noctis’s hands tightening on her shoulders and she leans up into that bruising grasp, into that mouth hot and heavy on hers. She knows the slopes and the curves of Noctis by now, almost as well as she knows her own, but the texture of that gorgeous cloth between them makes Noctis herself feel almost different -- and she shivers, and she can also feel how Noctis is shaking in her arms.

“You all right?” she whispers, softly, so close that she can still breathe in Noctis’s air, that Noctis can breathe in hers. 

“Feels strange,” she hears Noctis say. “Hands closer, please.”

“Oh?” And she grins, keeps looking into Noctis’s eyes, as she runs her fingers over dark cloth and then -- she touches bare skin, her hands sliding right into the places where the top flares open and then she’s spanning Noctis’s stomach, she’s stroking upwards towards her ribcage without even really thinking about it and Noctis lets out a shaky breath that’s more like a moan.

Which spears straight through Prompto and she catches her breath, too, suddenly all on fire with wanting and needing Noctis and she mutters, “Fuck, sorry, Noctis, I -- ”

She doesn’t even give Noctis a chance to answer: just kisses her again, fierce and biting at that lush mouth and -- Noctis pulls away too soon and Prompto hopes she only sounds frustrated.

“Gods, Prompto, don’t apologize, if you could look at yourself right now, if you could hear yourself right now.”

“I don’t care I just want you.”

“And I want you, fuck, get this off.” 

Noctis’s hands pushing her jacket away. Catching on the buttons of her shirt. 

She leaves her to it, looks for the side-seam zip on Noctis’s leathers and peels them partway away -- she has to look down when she comes into contact with even more skin and -- 

“Pretty,” she almost laughs, but she’s winded, too, as she feels along the top of Noctis’s very abbreviated panties. She tugs, a little, on a doubled length of soft narrow ribbon. “Wow, Noct.”

“I’m wearing leather,” is the almost defensive answer, but it’s spoiled by a quiet giggle.

“Because that explains everything,” Prompto laughs, and it feels good to laugh.

It feels good to forget everything else and everyone else, just for now, just for this -- and so she looks around at the night-garden, and the door they’d used to get out here in the first place, and she says, “Wasn’t joking about wanting you, but we can be someplace warmer if you’d prefer.”

“I don’t care about being warm,” is the answer, and Noctis is pulling away from her, is leading her around to the other side of the brick wall and its vines.

Patch of raggedly trimmed grass, and dewdrops, and the wind that’s at least not so very cold any more.

Prompto grins, shakes her head, and drops her jacket onto the grass -- pushes Noctis down onto it. “It’s not much of a bed.”

“It’s good, Prom, it’s okay, come here.”

On her elbows and knees over Noctis, kissing again -- why had they ever stopped kissing? Why can’t she be doing this forever? Noctis’s mouth, hot and sweet; Noctis’s hands, one caught in her hair and the other clenched in a fist in her half-undone shirt. Blindly, she pushes Noctis’s knees further apart so she can settle closer, right between Noctis’s thighs, and she leans in closer, kisses along the line of Noctis’s jaw. 

The collar and the necklace are in the way of that throat so she has to settle for undoing Noctis’s top -- the diagonal seam leads to four more buttons, snug along her right flank -- it’s slow going, clumsy, but then it’s a matter of flipping the entire front panel away and she can bend to Noctis’s torso, mostly exposed now to the night air, except for the lacy bra to match the panties. She can kiss down the slopes of her breasts. She can map the way Noctis heaves in breath after faltering breath, the expansion of her ribs, the tension in the muscles of her core. 

She’s not really thinking of any actual destination; she simply lets her mind wander, her hands, her mouth, and one moment she’s sucking a kiss-shaped bruise into Noctis’s stomach, and the next she’s kissing up Noctis’s flank, over the angles of her ribs. 

“Prom,” she hears, half a plea.

The clasp of the bra is in the front and Prompto catches Noctis’s eye -- and uses her teeth and tongue to undo it.

“ _Fuck_ ,” long low drawn-out groan.

Prompto hums, happily, and kisses at the ruts that the bra’s worn into the skin beneath Noctis’s breasts, soothing the angry heat with her tongue.

“Off with this,” she hears Noctis say, or maybe it’s a demand.

It takes her far too long to haul her shirt entirely up and over her head, because she can’t take her eyes away from Noctis.

Belt off, too, and her gun in its holster, and -- the last thing she does before she turns back is take out her hair stick -- she slides it into leather, alongside the barrel of the gun, and sets all that aside.

Wide-eyed gaze of Noctis. 

“Yes?”

“That was hot,” she hears Noctis say. 

“Okay,” she says, just to answer -- and then she puts her mouth to better use. Nipping kisses around Noctis’s navel, and then down to the panties, where she can’t resist nosing against the pretty material, the spreading soaked patch.

Noctis swears again, but she only hears it distantly: she’s licking at her hand, at her fingers, and she’s pushing Noctis’s panties aside and she has to laugh, and shiver. “Gods, Noct.”

“Have me, please,” is the plea of an answer, as Noctis tries to spread her legs wider.

Prompto manages to get two fingers into her, even with Noctis’s trousers in the way, and she bites softly at Noctis’s mons pubis through the panties, the smell of arousal filling up all her senses and all her thoughts.

Distantly she can hear Noctis cursing; distantly she can hear the rush of blood in her own veins. That strange silence that belongs only to her, once again -- but this time it’s not rooted in fear.

It’s exactly the opposite, and she dives into it, recklessly, needing and wanting it -- 

That, and the moan that she hears as she crooks her fingers a certain way within Noctis, getting her a strangled cry, and Noctis rolling her hips harder into her hand -- 

That gives her just enough leverage to fit a third finger into Noctis, and thrust again -- 

“Prom, fuck, please,” and the sounds falling from Noctis’s mouth are sweet and desperate and furious with need.

Breath by breath hissing through her teeth as she fucks Noctis, hard and deliberate strokes, trying to be careful about speeding up because she needs to see, because she needs to watch Noctis fall apart. 

She really, really, really wants to touch herself, too -- instead she leans over again and bites, none too gently, just above Noctis’s hip, and she groans out her name -- 

She hears Noctis gasp -- she twists her fingers more deeply into Noctis -- who finally shouts, an inarticulate sound that’s quickly swallowed up by the night all around them and the rising scents of crushed grass, of faraway flowers, and Prompto moans, too, as she feels the orgasm tear through Noctis, shaking through her -- she can feel it in the clench of her body, in the unsteady rhythm of her breaths.

It’s a little difficult to pull away from Noctis, but she does it, and at the last moment, before she drops onto the grass, she grabs her own discarded shirt with her clean hand and drapes it over Noctis’s bare skin.

“And you?” are the first words she hears out of Noctis.

Prompto looks at her, and grins helplessly. Puts her own arms around herself and shakes.

“Sweet idiot,” she hears Noctis growl, and she can’t help but laugh -- and she keeps laughing even when Noctis kisses her and then blazes a searing-hot trail down her chest, over her stomach -- she shivers as Noctis bites softly along the line of one of her stretch marks.

“I’d almost think you came while you were doing me, or something,” and then her mind blanks out as Noctis undoes her flies and sets that talented mouth to the sweet feverish ache between her legs -- and Prompto bites at the backs of her hands until she can almost taste blood because Noctis unravels her far too quickly, enough that she almost feels embarrassed.

But that’s a short-lived feeling; Noctis works her mercilessly, knowingly, until there’s nothing else to feel but the steadily building euphoria that burns out her nerves with white-hot pleasure -- the more so when Noctis laughs ever so quietly into her thigh. “You’re so sweet and you’re so good -- I’d make you come forever if I could -- ”

“Noctis, _please_ ,” she thinks she says -- and then Noctis does something else with her tongue, and with her hand -- and Prompto flies apart.

When she comes to, Noctis has half-buttoned her top back on, and that means she’s got her shirt and her jacket draped over her, and -- overhead -- the sky’s turning light, breaking into the half-distant silvers of another morning.

She blinks, and kisses Noctis, and puts her arms around her. “We live a very strange life.”

“I’m just glad I’m still alive,” is the response she gets, after a long moment. “That I kept on living long enough to find you.”

She doesn’t suddenly sob, or break down again, but she does whisper, in a voice that makes Noctis crane in closer to hear, “I didn’t even start being alive until I met you.”

“Something like that, yeah.”

Before she can answer, or try to squeeze in closer, a different voice rings out in the night-garden: “Noctis.”

Prompto catches her breath and clutches her shirt closed -- reaches for her gun in its holster and somehow manages to draw it as she’s getting to her feet, as she’s aiming for the door into the night-garden -- she looks at Noctis and snarls, “Stay behind me!”

And she looks back and past the muzzle of the pistol: a man and a woman, and the weary smile on his face, an entirely unfamiliar face.

“Fuck me,” she hears Noctis say. “ _Clarus?_ ”

Prompto takes a moment to understand that name -- looks and -- yeah, she can maybe see where Iris’s smile comes from, and the broad lines of Gladiolus’s shoulders -- 

“In the flesh, Donna,” and Clarus’s voice is even deeper than Gladiolus’s, burred and whispery around the edges.

“Stand down, Prompto -- and thank you for looking after her,” she hears Aulea say. 

“News,” and Noctis’s hand is sliding into hers.

“I need you to come downstairs with me: Stormland got here about half an hour ago and they say they need to talk to you. I’ve stalled them for as long as I could, but now they’re starting to get restless.” Even when she’s just shrugging, Aulea looks like she might be sitting on a throne. “And you know what happens when they do that.”

“ -- Shit yeah I do. Okay. Come on Prompto.”

“Can we please get dressed first,” she whispers as Noctis marches the two of them past Aulea’s mostly-hidden smirk, and the open amusement on Clarus’s face. “I mean, we wouldn’t even show ourselves to the others looking like this.”

“Speak for yourself,” she hears Noctis laugh. “I have and I will. But you’re right, not to Stormland, so where do you think we’re going?”

“I need to get clothes from my room too.”

“Don’t you leave me. We can just share stuff. Don’t forget your hair stick,” she hears Noctis say.

“Something tells me I won’t be taking it off for a while.”

That gets her a different kind of smile. Softer, lighter, somehow more real, and she can’t help but try to return it. 

“If you mind, though -- ”

“Fuck no,” and she clutches Noctis’s hand more firmly.


	17. Chapter 17

Something is prickling in the outer corners of her eyes and -- she blinks, and there is a cloud-haze in her vision and that kind of thing is more than enough to throw her off, and especially in a situation like this -- she doesn’t want to stop, but she has to, and she takes a long step back, even if she doesn’t really want to.

Blink, blink, forcing the tears from her eyes, and every blink stings. Every blink is a sharp short ache in the general vicinity of her temples, like a concentrated hit of slap-impact, like a branch of thorns and brambles raking over the thin sensitive skin and baring the bone beneath, and she almost expects to find blood staining her nails and her knuckles after she swipes the back of her off-hand over her face.

The roar and the ricochet, here, where the walls are cold enough to the point of exhaling back the warmth draining from her skin, and where the floors are even colder -- she can practically feel the way the temperature dips, the icy needles of prickling stabbing into the soles of her feet -- but it’s strange that the rest of her isn’t nowhere near that cold, or isn’t nowhere near as susceptible, and that’s already taking what she’s currently wearing -- or not wearing -- into consideration. Bare legs from thigh to calf, bracketed in two entirely different kinds of leather. Boots that cling to her ankles and feet even without the part where she still winds the extra lengths of shoelace around the tops. Shorts that she’s stolen from Noctis’s closet, mostly made up of pocket-space, except for the length of red and black tartan she’s threaded and knotted through the belt-loops.

The night-shaking echoes rumbling in her ears even when she’s wearing a brand-new set of earplugs, even after she’s finished fidgeting with her earmuffs so they’re in the right position, less cupping the sides of her head than outright clamping onto them -- and the tightness of that frame keeps her hair stick pressed into its current position, stuck into a half-tangled knot of hair and hairpins that hangs precariously behind her right ear.

She blinks again. Maybe her eyes will be okay now -- and she gets right back into her form. Sights in, fires off another volley of shots, and in the immediate aftermath she’s torn right down the middle between wanting to scrub the mounting rough stink of gunfire residue from her skin, and just as insistently wanting that smell to stay -- and that’s to say nothing of how the smell clings to her doubled sleeves. An inner set of broadcloth and an outer set of something that feels like rustling silk, two differently wide sets of cuffs that she keeps needing to hike up and out of her way. Two different sets of shirt-tails: one that she’s haphazardly tucked into the shorts, the other that brushes the backs of her knees every time she breathes.

Strange thoughts that fly through her on smoke-barred wings, like birds taking flight with every scream of the gun, every half-flash of flame from the muzzle of her own pistol -- the thoughts, the birds, that she shakes away roughly when she tosses her head again and smoothly, swiftly changes out the extended magazine. Here is the firing line. It’s easy to swing up her arms and redistribute her weight -- plant for the shot, sway through the recoil and let it go through her and past her, and then up again onto her toes to assess the next threat.

Which is no threat at all, really, because -- firing range. This is a firing range. Even if she had opponents here, they’re no more than phantoms, than the ghosts that whisper around the corners of her thoughts. They’re not really threats, any more than the large brown sheet of ring-printed paper that’s centered in her sights is: fluttering weakly at the far end of the alley, and its entire center is gone now. Vanished into smoking tattered edges.

It’s been gone from the moment she slammed the first magazine into her pistol, from the moment she fired the very first shot: she knew that then and she knows that now, as she looks at the complete absence of the X-ring -- which means what, exactly? It means she’s shooting through a smoking hole and directly into the far wall -- it means the bullets are no longer even being launched through the laughably nothing-like resistance of the paper, however thick the material actually might be. Just straight through that nothing, the zero-ring that no longer exists.

She allows herself a moment to grind her teeth and then she’s rolling her shoulders, she’s turning sideways on to the sheet, the weight of her gun gone entirely unbalanced in just one hand -- although she’s still in full control and she’s still gripped in the claws of her focus, and she fires off the last half-dozen shots, and the cramp that’s already catching in the muscles and the nerves of her right shoulder can only get worse from here.

To ice, later, whenever later comes -- or not to ice? That depends on what comes through the doors of the Citadel, next.

Will she have the time she needs to put herself back in working order, or will she have to carve out the time, or -- ?

Is it a comfort, she thinks, that she has that entire control over herself and what she does?

And is it a comfort that she’s not alone in this firing range?

Two lanes over: a gun that’s much bigger and much more powerful than her own, and that’s taking her bullets into consideration, that she’s chosen specifically for their increased stopping power. 

Here is a presence that she knows, intimately -- most days more intimately than she does her own self.

 _Shapeless_ is the word she’d apply to Noctis, or -- more correctly -- Noctis’s clothes, in this moment of time, in this moment of endless frustration and teeth bared in a snarl, that Prompto knows isn’t for her and all she can offer is her sympathy, her support, her presence here so that Noctis doesn’t have to be alone.

Noctis in a white shirt that only skims her shoulders and her ribs and her hips, in a pair of half-billowing trousers. The material is so light that it moves every time Noctis shifts position, and she has to do that after every burst, and Prompto watches her snarl and steady her hands around the ugly block of her SMG.

More than just the snarl, and the feral wordless sounds ripping out of Noctis with every precise and identical volley -- the wrinkle of deep concentration that crosses the scars and the lines in her face seems to dig itself deeper, all the way to the outside corner of her right eye, where Prompto thinks she’s only half-imagining the throb of a blood vessel and the impending hit of a stress-induced headache.

The headache that’s been hounding Noctis in the too many, too short, hours since Nyx Ulric, Libertus Ostium, and Amira Khara burst onto the threshold of the Citadel.

In Prompto’s hands, her pistol falls to pieces quickly, almost neatly, and she lays all the parts out on a large rigid board -- rimmed and pale-colored for the express purpose of cleaning things on it, including complicated firing mechanisms and pins and gears and springs -- and she’s able to crank her target back in, and lay that spent sheet across the pieces on the board. The fume-ghost of the missing -- obliterated -- X-ring, and the continued harsh chatter of the SMG in Noctis’s hands as she slaps in a fresh magazine and keeps going.

Chatter, like someone laughing in contempt and in hatred, and Prompto really doesn’t need to go there, does she?

She shakes her head and looks at the only shooter in this range now.

At Noctis, her snarl, the bitter shadows around her eyes, and the force of her entire body that might be bearing down onto her hand and her finger on the trigger. Force that’s overshadowed and haunted by something that looks a lot like sadness, that looks a lot like non-stop stress.

And they’d all thought there would be some sort of respite as the Lucis Caelum ranks clawed through the facts of Red Scourge, through the facts of insider information, stolen from the very heart of the Izunia organization. Noctis’s own invitation to the soldiers sworn to her and to her mother -- an invitation and a cry for help, and the demand for every single gun and every single blade to bend toward the cause of ending Ardyn Izunia his own damned self.

Instead there’s this, whatever this is, whatever it is that Stormland’s come here to tell Noctis, to tell Aulea -- and this is something that Prompto has been neatly shut out of.

She would have been fine with that. It’s happened to her before: she’s been given more and more of a choice, now that she’s with the Lucis Caelums, and she’s been happy to take that choice to shut herself out of the conversation. It’s nice to get to make the decision: because she still wakes up from nightmares, of nearly literal poison poured into her ears and no way to turn away, no way to stop herself hearing those terrible words and, one way or another, taking them into herself, if only for the express purpose of rebelling against them. If only for the express purpose and distant nonexistent hope of passing them on to someone else as evidence, as proof.

Fuck Ardyn anyway, and it’s a small and paltry revenge that she’s already done exactly that: everything she’d heard, everything she’d managed to remember, every word that she could grope for and drag up from the terrified depths of her mind -- every single thing that she’s ever hung on to, not even wanting to do so. Every last scrap of it passed on to Noctis and to the others. To Cindy and to Ignis and to Iris. To Ceres and to Aulea. All of it washed through her and away from her: might as well turn their sounds and their ideas into rope, into a noose, the one thing they could use to hang the asshole with.

And then there’s this night. Then there’s these hours: and now Stormland is here, has come to the Citadel and thrown the whole place into an uproar, and Prompto has been shut out of the conversation without anyone giving her the choice to stay or to go. 

That would have been all right, if she had been the only one shut out.

What makes it hurt is the others who’ve been shut out of the conversation: Cindy, and Ignis, and Iris.

The shadows framing Aulea, as she stood in the door: and for some reason she had loomed in that doorway, she had made it look like the doorway had been far too small for her, when in the single ghost of a glance that Prompto had seen of the room on the other side, the space had seemed far too large for her, and for Noctis, and the three leaders of Stormland. 

Aulea in that door, standing between her and Cindy and Ignis and Iris, and Noctis.

And sure, she’s seen Iris scowl and pout and then throw herself back into the heavy drills and exercises that she uses to keep herself sharp and honed and steady, in the role of the wall between Noctis and all of the enemies lurking outside the Citadel district. She’s seen Cindy stare into the depths of some unnamed and unnameable hour, her hands frozen over another gun, another ballistic vest, like the memory she’s thinking of is so terrible that she can’t even brush her hair back into its typical pretty curls. And she’s seen Ignis, tight-lipped and stern and his hands gone white-knuckled and cracking, as the scars in his skin stand out once again, as if freshly branded.

What she’s never seen is: their eyes hooded and betrayed and visibly struggling to hold those poisonous emotions back. Their faces bleak and blank, like they’re trying to understand why or how they wouldn’t be allowed to walk through that door, and join Noctis on its other side. 

It isn’t entitlement, Prompto thinks, a little dizzy and a little hurt, herself. Maybe not entirely that. The point of the others is to be -- the other perspectives, the other ideas, the other points of view, to help Noctis make the right kinds of decisions. 

Nights of sitting around a table that always got filled up with plates and cups and glasses, and every single item of cutlery eventually turned into some kind of model, some kind of piece in a weird game and board of strategies and tactics and possibilities. Keen eyes, keen minds, that never shut Prompto out of the conversation, even when she’s had nothing much to say, or to add, other than -- trivia. The fleet of Izunia vehicles. Preferred types of handguns and larger-caliber weapons. Whatever else Ardyn might be suffering from, like infections taking advantage of his drug abuse and his cancer to rage all the more violently through his body, and what keeps that same ravaged body alive. 

They’ve all welcomed her little asides; they’ve never made her feel like she had nothing to say.

Now they’ve all been made to feel exactly like there’s nothing they can say or do or give: summarily and completely, and she can’t really blame the others for looking resentful, in these hours, in their bowed-down backs as they’d left Noctis to her in this firing range.

And then, there’s Noctis herself: whatever she’s been hearing, whatever Stormland’s been trying to tell her -- it’s all settled on her shoulders like weights, and she’s already bowed down and Stormland has only been adding and adding to the burden she’s carrying. 

She can’t really blame Noctis for the ferocity of her, then, or the fact that she hasn’t even uttered a single word since the others left.

Not even to Prompto: and they’ve been alone together for hours now, the passage of time as inexorable as the growing fumes of spent smoke and gunpowder and primer and gods know what else. As inexorable as the ringing that persists in her ears, the ringing of the fraught silence between them, a silence as heavy as a grave -- and it’s rapidly being filled in, and she has no idea who’s holding the shovel --

Is she in this grave alone, or is Noctis’s grave -- or are they in it, in the depths of it, together?

Not this again, she thinks, no, not this thought of burying, and -- she staggers further away from the firing line.

The wall brings her up short, and she shivers and chokes down a cry, and now that she’s here, now that she’s worked herself up into this state, it’s better to be well clear of all her weapons anyway, and it’s better to be empty-handed, it’s better to not have to think about the idea of throwing something, firing something, at the others, the others she can’t bear to hurt --

How long does she stand against that wall? How long before her knees finally give out and she’s borne down to the floor beneath the weights she’s carrying on her own shoulders? No way of telling: all she knows is remembering that she started out standing up, leaning into the wall, and the cold touch trickling pain down her nerves from the top of her head on down.

Now, now, she’s on her knees and hunched over. Her legs covered in goosebumps. The tears that she thought had been painful, earlier, when they had stung at her eyes -- they sting on her skin, now, too, and she covers her face with her hands and feels herself shake -- there’s a scream that’s building up somewhere beneath her hollowed-out heart, and try as she might to stop it she can’t -- she can’t -- she throws back her head and lets out one single sharp sound, small in the blank space of the firing range, sharper than knives and a thousand swords driven into her -- 

Presence next to her that’s white and black, that’s the stink of gunfire caught in unstyled hair, that’s muscles and nerves and a voice corded with trigger-tension and stifled tears: “Gods.”

“Fuck them,” Prompto mutters, or thinks she mutters; she can’t hear herself over the cold echoes, the hollow-can inadequacy of her own stifled cry. “I would burn them and this whole world down and dance in the ashes right now. Give me a single can of fuel, Noct. Give me one lighter. Give me one match. I’ll burn it all and start with -- with -- ” She chokes, then. “Noctis I don’t know who to start with.”

“You can start with the gods and all the times they’ve fucked you over,” she hears Noctis say. “All I have is a list. Sometimes it’s a long list. Sometimes it’s a short list. I don’t know what to make of it. I don’t know why it changes.”

“I don’t even want to know who’s on it.”

“You should: you might have to be the last person standing between me and some of them.”

She’s surprised she can laugh at that. She’s not surprised there’s something wrong with the laugh: it sounds exactly like her earlier scream. “I’m surprised you didn’t just say I was on it.”

“What the hell would you be doing on it?” and those are arms wrapped around her, holding her, pinning her down here, and she doesn’t want to fight her way out of that strong circle. “Why would I do that to you?”

She’d laugh, if she didn’t feel so jagged and raw and scraped into a bleeding pulp. “Honestly? I didn’t even believe you the first time, when you said you didn’t always like the people around you. I mean, how could I? I’ve seen you disagree but you’ve always been a wall, all together, all of you.”

“Until this. Until tonight. Or whatever the fuck time it is now.” Noctis sounds on the verge of tears, too.

Prompto turns around and blots at Noctis’s cheeks with her sleeves. Gentle, as gentle as she can manage it, despite how she’s shaking. How they both are, and that means Prompto misses the mark a few times. Misses the stroke because Noctis is moving, too, shaking her head, but not to turn completely away. 

“Is this -- really the first time anything like this has happened?”

“My mom against all of you? All of you? Yes. And -- I stood there like a heel and didn’t even say one damn word to try and defend you guys. Some Donna I am. I have to be able to lead you, if I want to lead this entire family. And I was silent. I couldn’t offer you any reassurance. I couldn’t do anything, except look away.”

She tries to catch her breath and tries to hold on to the girl in her arms, and she tries to grasp for the right words to say, the right thought that’s forming in her mind, but the chain isn’t as strong as she wants it to be and she can only speak slowly, haltingly. “I -- I haven’t been with you that long have I.”

“I’ve lost track. Less than a year. We’ve done far too many things and the hours seem to stretch on for-fucking-ever. The minutes too. Why?”

“It -- just takes me a long time to get to what I want to say.”

“Unless you’re trying to make fun of someone and then -- you burned Stormland themselves, I remember that pretty vividly -- that was some amazing fast thinking, Prom.”

“Only because they were going after you,” she mutters, reaching out again to the stray strands of dark-grimed hair falling in Noctis’s face. “Pisses me off.”

“Thank you.”

“Yeah.” The point. What was she trying to say? “Noct: maybe you can’t tell me. Maybe you can’t tell us. Maybe -- what Stormland’s trying to do, is not even something you can tell anyone else in the family. I don’t know who else was in that room when you guys closed the door.”

“I can’t even tell you anything about that. I wish I could -- I really want to.”

And on any other night that might have been frustrating; if that had come from anyone else Prompto would have walked away.

But the words are convincing her more and more than her crazy hunch might well be the right one.

Still, she breathes -- tries to breathe -- tries to understand, before speaking again. “So, so, that tells me something. You can’t even tell, like,” and just in the nick of time, she remembers that she can’t say the other woman’s name. “Amicitia. That, that doesn’t mean anything good, does it, that she can’t even know. So: if she can’t know it and she’s your adviser -- ”

“Not mine. Mother’s.” 

“That’s what I meant to say,” Prompto says, and the words are starting to run together properly, now. “If Amicitia can’t know it and she’s that close to one of you -- then, Noct, you _really really_ can’t fucking tell us. Cindy or Ignis or Iris. You can’t tell me no matter what happens, or only as a fucking last resort, because -- is that part of being a knight?”

She looks up, and Noctis is shaking her head. 

“Fair, okay, fair,” Prompto mutters. “But. Yeah. Can’t tell us, and why not? Not because you’re hoarding the information, not because you want to use it to hurt us or whatever. It’s not malice. It’s, what’s it called? Whatever they’re here for, it’s maybe going to kill us or hurt us and -- you and Aulea, you wouldn’t do that to us, would you? I, I can’t think of you guys that way even though I probably should. To protect myself. Some knight I would make if I came around to, to hating you, to walking away from you, and -- so, so that I don’t do that, you’re not telling me.” 

She’s breathless, afterwards.

Noctis looks pale and shocked too. 

“Fuck, no way, was I right or wrong? -- no don’t tell me. I don’t want to know. I don’t think it would make sense for me to know.”

Shake of the head, wordless, in response.

Prompto lets the sound fall out of her mouth, and she can’t tell if it’s laughter or a sob, and she falls exhausted into Noctis’s shoulder.

Shivers.

“I can’t tell you anything,” she hears Noctis say, after a while. “Mother made me swear an oath.”

Her eyes would pop out of her head if she could only understand, Prompto thinks; she’s lost in the whirl of her thoughts and her fears. 

“Not about Stormland anyway. Not about what they came here for. But, but the knight thing -- ”

There’s a knock on the jamb of the open door into the firing range.

“I know a little about knights.”

Prompto gets to her feet -- but this time she blinks, slow and lagging and surprised. 

This is -- this has happened before, she thinks, and she says it out loud, in one word: “Again?”

Wheelchair, hands out in the open, this is familiar and strange and -- 

“Clarus,” she hears Noctis say. “Why the hell do you keep doing this? We ought to put a bell on you, and on your chair. We’re wound up enough as it is. Not your fault. But -- jumpy.”

“I noticed,” the man in the wheelchair says, quietly. “The number of times Iris has drawn on me in the last two days alone. But that tells me what she now knows about being alert at all times. Well done, Noctis.”

Shrug, indifferent.

So Prompto reaches for her gun-blacked hand and holds on to it, and tries to remember how to breathe.

“I admit it’s a bad habit,” she hears Clarus say, after a moment.

“If it gets you killed one of these days, you’d only deserve it,” she hears Noctis mutter, only mostly under her breath.

Clarus chuckles, and the sound makes her think of the scrape of a gun against its holster. “I’ve heard worse, and not from you.”

“Whatever.”

She goes, when Noctis sits down again: and when this time Noctis pulls her into her lap she’s too exhausted to argue. 

“Are congratulations in order?”

She’s looking at a scarred hand that’s being held out to her. The intricate network of lines and spots and -- here and there, in different textures, darker and lighter and raised and flat, old burn-welts crisscrossing Clarus’s skin. 

At least one of those scars disappears into the crisp dark material of his shirt and his suit jacket -- and that’s to say nothing of the ones that she can see, standing out against the dense ink wrapped around his neck for a collar. 

No delicate vines for him, she thinks, and remembers Iris talking about the tattoos she wears for her father. Thick boles grow up the sides of his neck and link around his throat in heavy-thorned branches; there are flowers curved in a sparse arc around the bottom of his left ear, following a wider line of scarring and the satellite-dashes of rough stitching. 

“That’s got to have hurt,” she says, before she can actually control herself.

“The ink? The rest? It did, it all did -- but I seem to have survived,” and Clarus chuckles at her.

“Not sure you’re all there,” she hears Noctis not-quite-mutter. “I always wonder how much of your brains you and Gladio still have, considering all the times you got yourselves bashed on the head. Each.”

“I hope Iris has learned better,” she hears Clarus say.

“Talk to her yourself, if you can find her again, if she doesn’t get you this time.”

Noctis does sound surly at the end of it, and Prompto grabs the hand that’s not braced at her hip, and presses a kiss to the knuckle of the middle finger.

“I had been planning to ask. I’m still offering to answer the questions you might have about knights, in return.”

“Or something. Your duties to me and to my mother and to your wife.”

Prompto blinks at that, trying to make the connection. “You’re -- Ceres’s knight?”

“No, but that’s only because she doesn’t get to have one,” she hears him say. “If she had remained in the running to succeed Regis, then maybe I would have had the chance to swear that oath to her. But she dropped out and she chose to follow Aulea instead, and that was that.”

“Didn’t stop you from being nosy enough to -- ask my dad.” Noctis sounds wistful, if wistful had way too many shadows around the edges.

“He started talking; I couldn’t help but pay attention.”

“Like I said. Nosy,” she hears Noctis say. 

“If you’re not a knight -- what are you?” Prompto asks, and she feels her cheeks immediately heat up with a blush afterwards.

Clarus only shrugs, one-shouldered, and continues to look at her in a direct and good-natured way. “That was only one of the shocks that you got, when you came to us, wasn’t it?” he asks. “Gladio and Iris were telling me about you. You found that it was not impolite to ask about ranks and positions and responsibilities around here.”

“People kept telling me it was okay if I just straight-up asked,” she says, softly. “If they didn’t volunteer the information right off the bat, like they trusted me, when they really didn’t have to.”

“It’s not a matter of trust, or did Ignis not tell you that?”

She blinks at him, and at Noct, and back to him. “Tell me what? -- obviously he didn’t.”

“It’s pride,” Clarus says, and is he smirking? She’s not sure. There’s got to be a reason for the uptick in the corner of his mouth. “We’re nothing if not proud. Mostly. If you’re about to die by a Lucis Caelum’s hand, you’ll probably hear who they are, either from their own mouths or from someone who’s running with them. So that when you cross the gates of hell, you can tell them exactly who was responsible for sending you there.”

“Pride. Including you, or you wouldn’t even be talking about it in the first place, right?” she asks.

She watches Clarus spread his hands and shrug.

She allows herself a brief snort. “Meaning, yes, that pride that you’ve got, too. And if we’re talking about it, if we’re doing this, that makes you -- ” She thinks about their first meeting, in the door to the night-garden. She thinks about all the references to him that had been made in the context to the night-garden. “You’re more than just the person who cares for the plants.”

“That’s my main task, here in the Citadel,” and Clarus nods at her, once. “But before those flowers, before the night-garden, I was, and still also am, a scientist. Before anyone started talking about oaths, about guns, I had been gathering data for a book on the plants that had once flourished all throughout Insomnia. Have the Nox Fleurets explained their quiet obsession with shades of dark blue, yet?”

Prompto shakes her head, winded at the sudden change in the topic. “What does that have to do with anything? But come to think of it -- all of Lunafreya’s ink is in blue. And she gave me a shirt in that color; it wasn’t even in her size, how could she even just happen to have one of those?”

“Old family legends about a flower. It’s called the sylleblossom -- it was the crest of Insomnia when they were still its leaders. I have no idea whether it was a real plant, or a story they just kept telling over and over again -- I had been trying to follow the trail through to where the story had started.”

“Only to land in my dad’s orbit,” and Noctis snorts, but maybe not to be unkind, considering the lopsided cast of her mouth. “There were books about sylleblossoms in that library, Prom, I just didn’t get around yet to showing them to you.”

“Will you lend me those books, Noctis?” she hears Clarus ask.

“I’ll bring them to you myself. I know that wheelchair’s a pain and a half.”

“Thank you.”

She’s still thinking the conversation through, and she almost raises her hand, but she manages to restrain herself.

But when Clarus turns back to her, she asks, “So the legends of Insomnia -- they’re mostly from them? Lunafreya’s family -- their name keeps coming up. I’m starting to think they might have been the, like the fairy-tale family, the founders, something like that.”

“That’s fair,” and Clarus nods at her again. “Maybe if we dig back far enough we’ll find that they were the founders of this particular Insomnia. It wouldn’t surprise me at all.”

“But -- plants?” There’s a thought that she needs to chase down. “What does a scientist studying plants -- ”

“Botanist,” she hears him say, helpfully.

“How does a botanist get mixed in with -- gangs?”

Noctis makes another kind of sound, more amused, if Prompto had to describe it. “Sometimes it takes people a long time to get to that question. Some people never ask it at all.”

“Shall I answer,” she hears Clarus say -- he looks like he’s about to start laughing, too -- “or are you going to do the honors?”

“Meh,” she hears Noctis say, and the sound is so much strangely lighter and strangely _her_ that she can’t help but lean in and kiss her cheek.

“Medicine,” and Clarus is blunt and kind at the same time, when he answers, and she can see where Gladiolus gets the down-to-earth manner from. “Where did the original medicines come from? Out of the earth. Out of the water. Sometimes it can be taken out of the air. But mostly it’s in the environment, it’s pretty much everywhere, even in cities. If you’re looking for things to heal with, look at the plants. Look at the animals.”

“I don’t really see animals here,” she says, nodding. “Maybe birds, but they don’t really do much with the night-garden, do they?”

“It’s nice if they leave their droppings in just the right plots.”

She makes a face at him. “I didn’t need to know that.”

“No, you didn’t, but it’s still true.”

“So, plants,” she says. “Are you telling me everything in the night-garden can be used in some kind of medicinal things?”

“Not everything, but most of them,” she hears him say. “Or at least that was the reason I gave Regis’s mother, so that I could get started in the first place. Moonflowers, one or two different kinds of lilies -- the small ones -- those didn’t always flourish. I had the gladioli for a year or two and then -- it turned out there was nothing much I could do with them, so I saved one root and gave up on the rest.”

“Mother’s been able to find a few new things for you, she must have mentioned that,” she hears Noctis say, after a moment.

“Yes, she has. I’ll see what I can do about planting them, or holding them for a better time. This isn’t exactly the right season to sow.”

“No it’s not.”

Prompto looks back to him, then. “Plants, but -- you asked me if I wanted to know about knights. You know about both of those?”

“Yes, I do. Ask me questions.” 

But the words are interrupted by an extended yawn, and Prompto’s eyes widen when she feels that she has to yawn, too, and then -- Noctis is nosing at her cheek, looking sleepy. “Fuck. Crashing.”

“Sorry,” she hears Clarus say. “You caught that from me.”

“Yeah you knew it was contagious.”

So Prompto hauls Noctis to her feet -- and before they can take up flanking positions on either side of Clarus, they double back for their respective guns. Prompto locks the pieces of her pistol in a compact hard case, and she helps Noctis click the catches closed on a soft-sack bag, just large enough to hold the cooling bulk of her SMG.

“Didn’t we talk about congratulations when I came into the firing range? I almost didn’t mention the other part, the condolences,” Clarus is asking, as the doors to the elevators open, and then he’s wheeling himself smoothly into the corridor -- Prompto only blinks when she notices that the carpets have been hauled away and stacked into corners, almost neatly.

“That was fast,” Noctis says from over on her other side.

“You’re supposed to say both?” Prompto asks, blinking at the back of Clarus’s head.

“Of course, or didn’t Aulea’s life, or Noctis’s, tip you off?”

“I’m used to just the condolences,” she says, after a moment.

She’s expecting questions after that, but Clarus only twists around in the chair. Only raises an eyebrow at her.

“This has got to be the first time I’ve ever seen you hold back on asking questions -- you can ask, you know, within reason,” and she squeezes Noctis’s hand, a little bit gratefully.

“I’m not sure I know what reason might be, and this is really only our first conversation,” and Clarus is shrugging again. “Or maybe I’m trying to think of a question that won’t sound too intrusive.”

“I guess you’re Gladiolus’s father for real,” and Prompto makes herself step over to his side. Makes herself keep pace. “He was -- well, how do I say this? I could tell how curious he was, he was practically breathing it out, but he also tried to stay polite. Or politeish.” She winces, a little. “I walked out on him when he asked me about what exactly Ardyn had done to me. Wasn’t entirely ready to put that into words again. Wasn’t trying to actively traumatize him either.”

By the time she finishes speaking his eyebrows have already met in a mass of creases. “I rest my case.”

“Then let me change the subject,” Noctis says.

“By all means, Donna,” she hears Clarus say.

“This one’s your fault anyway, talking about knights and all that shit. And I’ve asked her point blank and she won’t answer me -- makes me think that she doesn’t know, as opposed to she doesn’t want me to know.”

“Are we still talking about Aulea?”

She feels the snort that Noctis lets out. It almost makes her smile.

“Yeah, Clarus, we are.”

“All right. I was just making sure. What was the question?”

“Did she ever actually get down on her knees for Regis? Did she ever really -- make the promises of a knight? All I know’s that she trained to watch his back. The one thing everyone in this place agrees on. You have no idea the number of times I’ve asked her about the, the other thing: I’ve asked and asked and it took me too long to realize she wasn’t even planning to answer me. So -- I’m asking around. I’ve been. Your wife tells me she knows nothing, even though I think she’s lying through her damn teeth.”

“I would tell you to watch your own mouth,” and Clarus only sounds amused. “But something tells me there’s no point in even thinking it. Too late by far, am I.”

“It was too late the first time I asked, which I can’t even remember when it was.”

“I was there,” is Clarus’s response. “I heard you ask the first time. So I heard your mother’s answer.”

“Silence. Why?” Noctis does sound frustrated, then: and the words sound like clicks, like the switch on her SMG, toggling from semi-automatic fire to full-. “What did she have to hide?”

Prompto finds herself nodding along as Noctis continues, the words running slowly together at first, and then gathering speed, like faster and faster shooting drills. “What was so hard about saying _yes_ , about saying _no_? I don’t know if I would have been satisfied, but I would have at least gotten an answer, and I would have been able to think my way through to some kind of conclusion. Instead my own mother shut me out, too. Still is. I’ve never known what to feel about it.”

Hand, squeezing tightly around hers, and again Prompto steps closer. Again she offers her support. 

She’s woken up already held and shielded and protected in the warmth of Noctis’s presence.

She’s woken up curled around Noctis like blankets, like a wall between her and the rest of the world, the rest of the room in which they’ve been sleeping.

This is only a conversation, and this is no different.

“What do you know?” Noctis is asking.

Clarus only looks -- a little more distant, Prompto thinks, when she looks at him again. His eyes gone a little clouded, like he can’t even see Noctis, like he’s looking at, or looking for, someone who isn’t even in the corridor -- Prompto herself looks around and sees carpet, sees closed doors.

She wonders. 

“As you said,” he finally says, after he sighs deep and long and worn. “It’s been a long time she’s been -- not telling you what you wanted to know. Noctis.”

“Yeah.”

“Have you ever considered that she _couldn’t_ tell you?”

And Noctis stops.

Shudder of her breath escaping her.

Prompto strokes her thumb up the side of Noctis’s throat, and for some reason she’s on her toes, she’s ready to -- spring into action. Maybe she’ll just tell them both to shut up. Maybe she’ll have to tell them to save this conversation for another hour.

Or maybe she’ll have to shake Clarus so he’ll keep talking, because she can’t save Noctis from this, because right now only he can do that -- and she wants so very badly for Noctis to be saved, and she almost resents that she can’t do anything about saving Noctis from these questions, from whatever Clarus’s answer is going to be --

“Prompto,” she hears him say. 

She does take a step backward, like there’s a gun she can draw on him, and her weight planted to fire. “Yeah.”

“When did you know you were a knight? When you had become Noctis’s knight?”

Answers whirl through her: but really, all she can say is the truth. The first one, the bedrock of this whole thing.

“I was -- running for my life, and ran straight past Noctis and she jumped over me.” She takes a deep breath, for the next words. “And then I looked up and I asked Noctis to make it look like she was going to kill me, knowing nothing about why I asked her to do it. 

“And I knew I’d do anything she wanted me to do, if she did that.”

“She did,” and Clarus is nodding at her and at Noctis in her arms. “I know that. I was told. Iris said she won’t forget the looks on your faces. Yes, both of you. She said -- it was something like, you didn’t know you were running home, and then suddenly you were home. That home was each of you.”

“Is that what she said?” she hears Noctis say, faintly. “After she yelled at me? At us?”

“I never heard her shout at you,” Prompto murmurs, mostly for Noctis’s ears.

“She was, she did. I remember how loud she was.” Blink, and a moment of those blue eyes going unfocused, and that’s when Prompto realizes they’re looking into each other’s eyes again. “I can’t remember what she was saying. Not any more.”

“I guessed it would come to that. And the answer to your questions is, that look you’re both wearing right now.”

Prompto blinks, too, and looks at Clarus. “What?” A breath, and she finds the rest of the question. “What does that have to do with anything?”

“I saw a look like yours in Aulea’s face once, Noctis, and only once, and Regis wasn’t even looking back at her -- he couldn’t.”

“When,” and to Prompto, Noctis’s question sounds like a snarl.

She watches Clarus take a breath of his own, and look away. “She was on her knees. Ceres and I were on the other side of a -- table. We’d half-destroyed it, using it for cover. It was about to fall apart. But somehow it had held when we placed Regis on it.”

Noctis is turning pale and cold, slowly fearful, in her arms. “You placed him on it. Was this -- ”

“Yes.” 

Nothing changes in the light of the corridor. Nothing changes in the carpets beneath her feet. Nothing moves in that place.

But something falls in Clarus’s eyes, like a shadow. “We watched him fade, all three of us. He had been holding on somehow. I still don’t know how he lasted as long as he did, in that fight: it felt like every single Izunia gun in that encounter had been nailed onto him. Sights fixed in. He should have died with the first shot -- he didn’t, obviously, and he gave us all our orders and we followed him, we fought at his side, until he fell in on himself.”

She grips Noctis tightly, when she lets out a sob. “I’ve heard this before.”

“And when did your mother fall to her knees? She’s never told you when exactly. Has she.”

“No,” she hears Noctis say, very quietly.

“He was looking right at us when he stopped breathing. He was looking away from her.

“He never saw her.” 

Noctis jolts, in Prompto’s arms.

She’s ready to -- catch her, shelter her, carry her away from here.

But all she can do is be the mute witness at Noctis’s back when she bows her head. “She never did -- not before -- ”

“One of us would have known,” and the answer helps Prompto fill in the blanks with the missing words. “One of us was always with them. Always with Regis. It was our responsibility to protect him, and I would have heard it, or Ceres would have, if Aulea had said the actual words.”

“So it was -- never the same,” and Noctis is nodding, slowly. “She didn’t say.”

“And as she didn’t then -- she couldn’t, now. Or any of those times you asked.”

“Would’ve counted in Lunafreya’s family,” she hears Noctis say. “Doesn’t. Didn’t. Not for Lucis Caelums unless the words are said out loud.”

Half-turn of the girl in her arms. “You said yours and I heard you. I said I heard you.”

Prompto can only nod, once. “And they heard me in the other room. Cindy said so, afterwards.”

“Yeah. So it counts for you. It happened for you.” Noctis’s smile is tiny and too full of edges that Prompto nearly lets her go. “My mom -- waited too long. So she doesn’t count.”

“I’m sorry.” Clarus’s voice nearly makes her jump. 

“No, don’t,” she hears Noctis say. “You didn’t do anything, which means you didn’t actually do anything wrong, so you don’t have to apologize, and apology not accepted.”

“You’ve been wanting to know, and now what you know is -- ”

And Noctis cuts him off again. “If that’s how it went, then that’s how it went. Thank you, for telling me.”

“Noctis.”

“Whatever it is you wanted to say, whatever apologies you have -- I already said, Clarus. Keep them. I don’t mean to be rude. I -- does it change anything?”

“No, Donna,” she hears Clarus say, in the same quietly defeated tone. “But it doesn’t answer anything.”

“It only raises more questions,” she hears Noctis say. “None of which belong to -- this time. Maybe if we do something about this, about Insomnia, about the Izunias, then maybe we’ll all get to the part where we can actually ask questions and get the answers that we need. But -- that’s not now, is it?”

And Prompto watches Clarus’s mouth open and close, as if there’s something else, as if he’s trying to find the words.

But a sudden chime of arriving catches her attention, instead. 

“ -- Noctis is that you? We can hear your voice. I think we got lost -- ”

Loud voices, laughter. Strangers walking in these halls, heavy footsteps, and Prompto knows she doesn’t mean to, but she hisses, and some strange force catches at her feet and propels her forward, until she’s standing between the strangers and Clarus’s wheelchair, leaving Noctis to guard him.

Fear shivers in her breaths and that doesn’t make sense at all: not when they’re this far into the Citadel, and not when they’re this high up -- and that should be true for these strange faces, too. If they’re here, if they’re facing her down as the grins turn into wariness, then maybe they have some kind of right to be here.

But they’re strangers, and they make her wish she could put her gun back together so she could -- hold on to it. Not quite draw a bead on them, not yet -- but she wants to be ready for that and for any other possibility.

Strangers, in this night, in this place: she focuses on the man who’d rounded the corner, first. Huge-built in a deceptive way, like he wants people to think that it’s only flab that’s straining the seams of his jacket and his trousers, but the definition in his shoulders and in upper arms more than gives the game away, as does the steel-gray of his eyes, the sly twist of his mouth. 

Right on his heels, poised in a way that makes Prompto think of Ignis winding up to slash with his knives: the woman, small and sturdy and wide, shoulders and hips and the prominent muscles all down her legs, and the elaborate updo of her hair, tightly braided into pretty loops. But instead of knives she’s wearing half a dozen sharper hair sticks -- if she looks closer, if she almost lets herself think about it, Prompto could almost think of the ornaments as beautiful needles.

And the third person: who very nearly runs right into the woman’s heels, and at first Prompto’s only watching her bare her teeth at him, half a grin and half an offended grimace, and the man’s looking at her, hands up and open in the air. 

“What the fuck, Nyx Ulric,” she hears Noctis snap. “You know you’re not supposed to be here.”

Glance over her shoulder that allows her to watch as Noctis reaches into a pocket.

“I just said. We got lost.”

That man is dressed in the same mismatched browns and greens and blues as the other two -- but in the next instant Prompto forgets them, and everything else. Forgets their colors, the possibility of them being armed, the presence of her own companions next to her -- for once she can’t even feel Noctis stepping up to her other side, and therefore she can’t lean towards that blade-keen reassurance.

And it’s only a little bit like the end of the world, she thinks, as she feels all her muscles clench now, like teeth, sawing at her nerves and at the edges of her mind -- and there’s a roar in her blood like fear and recognition, because she’s still, impossibly, looking into those wide open living eyes.

Those eyes on this man with the far too long hair, beads strung onto wire and wound into the scatter of finger-wide braids -- that man who straightens his shoulders and lifts his chin focuses on her, and she knows the color of his eyes. She can remember that exact cloud-clear blue, cold and piercing. In this man those eyes are keen and calculating but they’re exactly the same colors, the colors that had once in Loqi’s eyes, a distinct rim of darker lavender around the outer edges of the blue -- 

The word -- the name -- that falls out of her mouth, mostly out of her control: “Loqi.”

Across the way, across this short stretch of corridor that’s all the world she cares to know in this moment, that man freezes. Mouth opening, in shock or in rage she almost demands to know, and his words like a fight, flung right at her: “Say that again -- how do you know -- what did you just say -- ”

“Nyx,” someone says, several someones say, and Prompto’s beyond telling those voices apart for friend or foe or bystander or ghost. She’s beyond identifying them.

Even the presence that closes in at her side now is -- only a shadow that she knows, maybe a shadow that she loves, but she breaks away and she reaches out to the man wearing the braids, and she thinks she’s about to fall to her knees. “You have his eyes. I remember he used to have such lovely eyes, and I tried to tell him, and maybe, maybe he didn’t always hear it, or hear me. But I told him. His name, his name was Loqi.”

“Loqi Tummelt,” she hears the man say. “I knew a Loqi. I’ve been looking for him. That was his name, that was all I knew of him.” Oh gods, he’s fast -- he’s on her, he’s right there, right in front of her! “How do you know his name! Where is he!”

She cringes, and steps back -- but only just the once because her legs hit an obstacle, one that doesn’t give way, so now she’s here, she’s trapped!

And all she can do is speak: the anger on that stranger’s face reminds her of her friend, so much, like he’s a ghost and Loqi is the reality. Loqi and the blood on his hands, the bits of broken bone scattered in the pale strands of hair. The twist of the mouth as he’d spoken to her, quiet and gentle and urgent too, in those last moments. Making that last request. All that had been left of him, just before the end. 

“I don’t know his last name,” she says, hating that her voice shakes so much. “I never knew it. No one ever told me, and maybe he forgot it too. They didn’t exactly care about us, they didn’t even care about him any more, just kept him alive because he was their favorite test subject. 

“He had eyes like yours until, until the last time I saw him: he was so full of Red Scourge he was pale, he was faded, and he was almost gone -- and he killed the men who were guarding me. The men who were watching so that I couldn’t run away. Tore them apart with his bare hands! I saw the blood all over him but not in his face, not in his eyes -- his eyes had turned gray, all the color in him was gone.”

Dimly, she registers a voice choking on some sort of prayer: “Holy gods and Astrals above.”

“None of which are even looking at this fucking city, they’ve forgotten us, they did a long time ago.”

“So it is,” and that’s the man before her, snarling.

But Prompto can only barely think about the voice that had been cursing. She can only barely think about leaning into it, into the words that had been spoken for her.

Back again to the man with Loqi’s eyes and -- she has to keep telling the story.

It’s the last story, the last piece of it, and someone deserves to hear it, for Loqi’s sake.

“I was in chains. I said they were watching me. I was a prisoner like Loqi was and when he broke free, he broke me out too. All he needed was his bare hands. He told me that I was free, he told me to run -- and I wanted to take him with me, I was screaming at him, begging him to come with me,” and the sob in her throat finally yanks itself out, and she tastes blood on her teeth in the wake of it, even as she falls to her knees, and the words continue to come. “He said no, and I screamed at him! I said I was going to get him out! I had to make him come with me!

“You know what he said?” She laughs, she sobs, she can’t really tell, but she feels like spitting her words out now, even if she’s coring herself out with every sound. “He said he was dead. He said he was gone. He didn’t know anything about the outside world now. He didn’t want to be in the outside world now, he was finished, he was too afraid, too dead!

“He said I was alive, he said I needed to get out if I wanted to stay alive, and he just wanted me to do one thing for him -- all he wanted of me was, all he wanted -- ”

Hands on her shoulders, clawed comfort, the distant sound of someone calling her name: “Prompto!”

She only has eyes and ears for the man before her: who growls. “What did he want.”

“I said he was full of Red Scourge, he’d had so much more of it than I had ever had, they didn’t want to ruin me as quickly as they did him -- they wanted to turn me into him, only more slowly, so they’d get more out of me, so they could use me longer than they could have ever used him -- but they _had_ used him, they had destroyed him, right from the moment they gave him the first dose he was heading to where he was, and -- and he asked me to set him free.”

Tears now, burning down her cheeks, as the words burn in her mouth. “He was done with Red Scourge. He was done with being destroyed. That was the point of him and he was done with it, done with the people who’d done all that to him -- so he asked me to get him out. Not the way I was going to get out. His terms, it was his terms and not mine and I did it for him, I did it because he asked me.”

She brings her hands up, at last, now that she can move again, now that she can make herself do it. Now that she has to do it. Pistol in pieces next to her, and the weight of it that she knows when it’s all assembled into its deadly whole, that she can’t feel in the here and now and that doesn’t matter: she joins her hands around the imagined shape of it, rests the imagined muzzle of it right against the soft spot beneath her chin, in the angle of her throat.

Smiles at the man at last, remembering how Loqi had whispered about her smile, how he’d thanked her for smiling, at the very end.

Small pathetic broken it might be, but it’s still the same smile, she thinks: and this man deserves it as Loqi had. “He asked me to kill him. So I did. Put my gun here, you see where it is, and I said, good night. I said, goodbye.

“He said, thank you.

“I fired, and I ran for my fucking life, and I never thought I’d see his eyes again, but here you are, and I don’t even know who you are. You, alive, who the fuck are you and what are you doing with his fucking eyes? Why do you have his fucking eyes?”

She chokes again, looks away, fights to catch her breath. 

The next time she looks back, she makes herself look right into those living eyes. “I’ve sworn my life to the Lucis Caelums or, or I would offer it to you. I’ve sworn my life to Noctis or I would give my life to you, I don’t know who you are, I’m just sorry I can’t ask you to take my life in exchange for Loqi’s -- ”

“Prompto -- shut up!”

The hands holding on to her turn her, force her to turn, and she’s small and weak and she lets herself linger in that embrace for only a moment -- she tries to cover up the rising wail of anguish and loss in her own breaths, in her own tears.

There’s a murmur, close by, broken and quiet, and she wants to stay in it: because it’s familiar and warm and almost kind, almost good, in this painful night and all its hurts.

But there’s still something she needs to say, and she -- she’s so tired all of a sudden, and she doesn’t get back to her feet. Only turns her eyes toward the man, even if she can’t see him now. “I wish I could ask you to forgive me. You have his eyes. I wondered if he had family, I tried to ask him, he never could give me any actual answers -- I thought maybe that fucking drug had taken that from him too. But obviously he had family, because you. You’re here. I killed him because he asked me to. He opened a door for me, so I opened one for him. I said goodbye, and.” 

She smiles again. “He was smiling, when he died. He was himself, I think. He was -- he was Loqi, when he died.”

“Because you let him be himself again.”

Her eyes clear -- and the man is holding his hand out to her. 

His face, wan and bloodless and lined with something like grief -- but there’s something else in his eyes, a dim light, nothing that she can recognize.

Why is he trying to smile at her?

“Nyx,” she thinks she hears someone say, again.

“He was mine,” the man says. “My family. Only one I had left, who was actually my blood, I mean. He was my sister’s son and I lost him nearly from the moment he was born. Can’t tell you how long I’ve been looking for him, can’t tell you how long I’ve been holding on to hope. But thanks to you I can let it go.”

“Sorry,” she whispers, she whimpers.

“No, I,” she hears him say.

And: “Donna, permit me.”

“No!”

“Please. Noctis.”

“Noctis,” she says, and it’s her turn to say it, and the arms around her loosen, and there are eyes looking at her that aren’t like Loqi’s at all. Eyes full of tears and a hard kind of sympathy, like a witness to too much death and too much grief. 

“Prompto. I -- I don’t know what to say.”

She doesn’t, either, but she knows what to do, and she says, “What was that in your pocket?”

“No,” she hears Noctis say, again, but this time she looks horrified. “I -- you made a promise to me.”

“I did. I’ll still make it, if I get through this, if we all survive this. So, please, give it to me.”

Knife, unfolded, small and sharp and just barely gleaming, and the whole thing just fits in the palm of her hand.

She nods. “Thanks, Noct.”

And she turns, offers that knife to the man who’s still crouched over her. “One shot. That’s all you can get. It’s a war out there. I plan to fight it, and I’ll fight it for me, for Noctis, and for Loqi. But -- but before we all get started: you get one shot. I can give you one shot.”

She hears Noctis swear, a long low roiling phrase -- and then Noctis’s arms are around her, heaving her to her feet.

Quicker than her own thoughts, the man is upright too, tension in his face and in his eyes, the straight dark line of his eyebrows, the ridges in his forehead. 

“Put that down,” is what she hears out of him. “I don’t want it.”

“Okay,” she whispers, and she refolds the knife, and -- steps clear of Noctis.

Eyes closed. Chin up. Throat bared.

Step, coming toward her, and hands seizing hers, cold and shaking.

“What’s your name,” the man says. 

She has to swallow before she can answer. “Prompto Argentum.”

“You killed my nephew.”

“He asked me to set him free,” she says.

“So you shot him.”

“Yes.”

“Open your eyes, Prompto Argentum.”

She does, and instantly flinches away because he’s _right there_ , and he’s seizing her by the shoulders -- he’s pulling her close, and she can’t respond to him. Doesn’t know what to say or do.

He says, quietly, _“Thank you.”_

And the sob that breaks out of Prompto is too loud and too small all at once, for the mourning, for the grief, for the rage.

**Author's Note:**

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> 
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